How can we shift power through our evaluation approach?

Abstract Information: Authentic community engagement means including community members when making decisions about improving the health of the community. This is sometimes called shared decision-making or shared power. It is a key part of the work that needs to be done to increase health equity. Authentic community engagement requires time and space to build relationships. Also, it must honor the histories, cultures, knowledge, needs and desires of people who have been most affected by inequities. Some go further and call for ‘power shifting,’ which refers to when community members become the primary decision-makers. Not all efforts described as ‘community engagement’ include power sharing or power shifting. This paper shares learnings from a project that aimed to bring more understanding around how organizations may share or shift power to communities to promote health equity. The client requested this learning to better support community-driven projects that they fund. We wanted to know how organizations engage authentically with communities to promote health equity. Throughout this project, we worked with eight diverse organizations who agreed to learn together and share learnings with others. Some participants are grassroots community-based organizations led by people who are part of the community they serve. Others are “grass tops” organizations that have some power over investments in the communities. Leaders may share fewer personal experiences with parts of the communities they serve. For this paper, we will focus on the process we undertook to learn with organizations in a more equitable manner. While we heard each organization’s stories about their experiences and reflections on how they’ve been involved in and worked with communities, we also worked to model the kinds of practices that would allow these organizations to drive our learning. We wanted to make sure that none of the activities were purely about taking information from the participants in ways that provided no benefit to them. Through conversations with these organizations, we designed activities that would be valuable to them and to the project learning. Along the way, we reflected on and asked for feedback so that we could improve our approach. We had conversations, adjusted, and had more conversations to co-design the learning. Like organizations we learned from, we encountered a number of stumbling blocks and made mistakes, both of which required apologies and shifts in direction. Throughout, we experimented with different ways for organizations to share their stories of shifting power to communities and we grappled with how best to pass along these stories to other organizations as well as the client.

Relevance Statement: This paper tells our story of learning that intends to center the most marginalized, negotiates value for both participants and the client, and to devise processes through which community organizations could steer both the way we learned and what we learned about community engagement. Through one-on-one and group reflections, participants shared their stories about how they have and continue to become more proficient at shifting power to communities they intend to serve and they strengthened their own practice. In other words, participants drove their own strengthening of practices as they drove learning for other users of the knowledge generated. Throughout the project we grappled with a number of important considerations about our approach, as we intended to practice and improve our equitable methods. These included: relationship and trust building, mitigating past harm, devising methods for centering stories of the most marginalized participants and forums for story sharing, facilitating self-reflection about shared stories, and developing honest and useful recommendations. Our design and processes were very much influenced by theorists focused on participatory and equitable strategies for evaluation. Our approach was aligned with the client’s aim to both transform their own practices towards power shifting and to better support organizations who also do so.