The changing story of evaluating coalitions and community engagement

As a seasoned evaluator, I can no longer count the number of programs I’ve evaluated over the years. They have had good outcomes, shown they had impact on the participants. Yet, over 35 years later, the problems they were designed to address persist, and have even expanded. What is needed is transformative change that can come from work being done through coalitions that partner with community members to target systems level change. Building and evaluating coalitions is a new part of the evaluation story and has changed the role of the evaluator in two ways. First, evaluators need to work to engage with community members authentically and completely. This requires cultural humility and relationship building that begins with self-reflection and introspection. It goes beyond technical skills, research methods, and statistics. Second, we need to work WITH coalitions and their members as co-evaluators using genuine participatory methods from design through reporting. We cannot do focus groups and listening sessions and call it participatory any longer. Our role is now to build member capacity to engage as partners in evaluation planning, data collection, data analysis, and sharing results. In this presentation, I will describe these changes and share stories and examples of building coalitions that are culturally responsive with the full range of stakeholders, including members of marginalized communities.