Meet Our Partners: Joel Cazares

At Engage R+D we are constantly reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning, including in conversation with our partners. Here we hear from Joel Cazares, from Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities.

Tell us about your role and the issues you seek to address.

I am the Director of Operations with the Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities (SABHC) Hub and Co-Director of the SABHC Initiative. We address the extractive and exploitative use of expertise, knowledge, and time of impacted populations to advance social movement and individual organization agendas, the transformation of organizational cultures, and evaluation using a popular education approach that is meaningful, impactful, and accessible to the community and designed by the community.

We focus on meeting the immediate needs of most impacted populations that are excluded from public benefit and other supports and transforming access to equitable/just resources and opportunities for communities impacted by inequities, while promoting community well-being and cultures. Ultimately, our goal is for impacted communities to have the autonomy and resources to lead and shape their lives and communities towards greater equity, health, justice and liberation.

In what ways has learning and evaluation contributed to your work?

Learning and evaluation has been a big component of SABHC in informing accomplishments, success, and lessons learned. It has provided guidance and strategy to approaching advocacy/community campaigns and grant deliverables. However, standard learning and evaluation practices have not been helpful in capturing and informing the impact of community work, movement, and individual/familial transformation. In 2018, SABHC understood that the traditional approach to evaluation and the process and results were disappointing; it was not equitable and descriptive of the realities of families and the organizing work that led to huge victories and accomplishments in Santa Ana, as well as the negative impacts movements and initiatives have in communities.   

From there, SABHC made the leap to learning the Equitable Evaluation Framework™to adopt it as a learning tool that can better inform the impacts of organizing work, organizing cultures, and the successes and lessons learned, informed by those most impacted and at the helm of movement. We had to unlearn standardized evaluation practices to allow for a creative approach and thinking of most practical, culturally relevant and accountable ways to capture and share the impacts and learnings of our work and organizational supports that are accountable to the community. The support and guidance we’ve received from Engage R+D, specifically Giannina Fehler-Cabral, in learning the EEF principles and design have led to the development of new evaluation tools and practices that are now being implemented and modeled in SABHC spaces. We’ve identified tools for story gathering and storytelling and have adopted the power of community Podcasts and Photovoice to share the truth beyond data points for individual community members and the impacts of it from their own lived experience.

What shifts are you seeing in evaluation and/or philanthropy and what promise do those hold for the work going on in communities?

With the introduction and adoption of the Equitable Evaluation FrameworkTM, community members are now taking the lead in evaluating and learning from their work and grassroot powerbuilding, as well as moving away from being data references to letting their voices and lived experiences be the guiding points for transformation and ownership of their story, their work, and its impacts. We still have a ways to go to ensure this community-driven practice is given the proper recognition and funding as a learning practice centered in community, one that moves away from harmful traditional evaluation practices where evaluators are the experts and arbiters of peoples livelihoods, experiences, and inequities. Equitable evaluation challenges the traditional evaluation orthodoxies and is transforming the field by advancing equity and uplifting the voice of communities. 

What do you hope to see shift even more and what might it take to get there?

I hope for shifts in organizing and funding cultures so that they are more aligned with community transformative principles that center and gain direction from disenfranchised and systematically oppressed communities. To get there, we must bridge divides in communities and agencies to move towards a cultural transformation that advances equity and human rights. At SABHC, we seek to uplift the expertise of our communities through equitable evaluation as a popular education tool where community members can lead learning practices, develop new evaluation tools, and have the opportunity to earn an income from it.