Evaluating the Evolving and Complex Advocacy and Social Movement Stories of the Caregiver and Constituent-Led Efforts to Foster Child and Family Well-Being Initiative

Abstract Information: This presentation will narrate the story of our collaborative evaluation: How we used a developmental, culturally-responsive, and participatory approach to evaluate the evolving and complex advocacy stories of the Constituent-Led Efforts to Foster Child and Family Well-Being (CECF) Partners. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) established the CECF Initiative to support an approach to civic engagement and leadership development that identifies parents, guardians, child advocates, and other direct stakeholders as critical contributors to the policymaking process. Community Change (CC) is the Coordinating Center that selected and supports CECF Partners in leading constituent-led efforts that focus on state and local advocacy strategies to improve child and family well-being. The Creative Research Solutions (CRS) team is the Initiative’s learning and evaluation partner. We hope to present the collection and analysis of qualitative data/stories, our collaborative journey, and the taken actions to change the dominant narrative about advocacy and social policy change efforts. This presentation - will first describe how our investment in building trust, relationships, and collaboration throughout our work resulted in an evaluation that was nimble, responsive, and nuanced; - will demonstrate how our approach acknowledged that social change is a long-term process. As a result, measuring and documenting incremental successes that helped CECF Partners move towards their respective, ultimate goals was the focus; - will describe the case-study approach that uses multiple data sources (i.e., document review, key informant interviews with Partners) to provide detailed descriptions of each CECF Partner’s individual advocacy strategies and results. Particularly, we will focus on how Partner organizations engaged in constituent-led organizing work, how CC’s technical assistance supported Partner organizations, the emergent successes, challenges, and lessons learned, and how the broader social and political contexts shaped the CECF Initiative; and - will, in coordination with some CECF Partners, narrate how (a) each Partner’s CECF work was situated inside their broader grassroots and organizing efforts to advance policies for their constituencies, (b) each individual CECF Partner’s story was interwoven into the broader tapestry of interconnected goals and visions across Partners’ activities that support the overarching CECF Initiative goals, and (c) grassroots advocacy, civic engagement, and leadership development can be better harnessed in advancing child and family policies. We will end with a field-building, ‘learning-to-action’ conversation with the evaluation collaborators and partners sharing their takeaways based on their role in this Initiative. - Funder perspective: An RWJF evaluation team member will share insights from a strategy, programmatic, and evaluation lens that may inform RWJF’s next steps in terms of funding and long-term sustainability. - Implementation Partner perspective: A CC team member will reflect on their work in serving as a coordination center for the CECF initiative where they provided technical assistance and synthesized learning from the CECF partners to deepen knowledge and understanding of local contexts and the role that these contexts play in shaping policy discussions. 
Relevance Statement: The ongoing Caregiver and Constituent-Led Efforts to Foster Child and Family Well-Being Initiative (CECF) Evaluation uses a developmental, culturally-responsive, and participatory approach to evaluate a place-based and constituent-led advocacy initiative. The evaluation invests in the long-term process of promoting social change by centering trust, relationships, and collaboration in evaluation planning, data collection, and learning. This paper will present information about the process and implementation of the CECF Initiative and preliminary findings from the evaluation and share broader learnings for our respective fields. This paper shares the process of (1) navigating the complexities of the historically hard-to-evaluate field of advocacy and organizing for social change and (2) using Culturally Responsive Equitable Evaluation (CREE) principles and methods to elevate diverse voices throughout participatory processes across evaluation contributors, including the funder, national partner, and regional community organizations. Thus, we believe the findings will be useful to funders of community-based advocacy and policy organizations, evaluators of advocacy and policy initiatives, and public policy advocates. Additionally, the authors will discuss the theoretical and practical elements that informed the evaluation to highlight the themes of trust, relationships, and collaboration, including the mosaic of advocacy stories that emerged from the learnings. The authors will also describe how the evaluation used member-checking to solicit feedback from evaluation contributors to increase the accuracy of findings. The authors will discuss how they presented findings using a case-study approach to surface implementation strategies and learnings from each contributor, situate individual work within the broader field of constituent-led policy-making, and illustrate how these stories helped connect goals and visions across place and context. Following the presentation, the audience will have the opportunity to converse with the evaluation contributors, who will reflect on their experiences in the evaluation process and how they leveraged the stories of grassroots advocacy, civic engagement, and leadership development to advance child and family policies.