140 - Building Capacity for Focus Group Facilitation in Community Organizations

Abstract Information: Focus groups are an important qualitative data collection tool that can be harnessed by community organizations as part of culturally-responsive evaluations aimed at improving programs. Focus group facilitation is often a skill learned in academic, advanced-degree settings and many community-based organizations and neighborhood associations are stretched thin due to resource, personnel, and/or funding constraints. Academic researchers can increase the capacity of community organizations to attain valuable evaluation data through collaboratively designing and implementing focus groups. Yet focus group training provided to community participants by academic partners can be challenging to deliver quickly and filled with unexpected barriers.
This poster aims to delineate an approachable and easily adaptable process for building community partner capacity to facilitate evaluation focus groups through critical analysis of a recent evaluation of a Chicago-based gardening initiative. An hour-long training session was delivered via Zoom to staff at Chicago Grows Food, a grassroots collective of urban growing non-profits whose goal is to improve food security and sovereignty among communities of color in Chicago. The training included basic theory, potential data implementation, the skills and steps necessary for facilitation, and practice simulations. The training was recorded and ownership was distributed to the organization so that it could be retained as a capacity building resource. Future iterations of such projects should tailor the material to the pre-existing knowledge of its members, deliver the training closer to the scheduled date of focus groups, include more time for practice simulations, and prepare further for potential language barriers.

Relevance Statement: Working with community organizations to develop the skills for evaluating and improving their programs is a matter of equity, for it is often academics and consultants who wield the evaluation decision-making power. Thus, harnessing academic partnerships to build evaluation capacity among community organization staff is critical. Such efforts can lead to more culturally-responsive evaluations because non-profit staff often possess better contextual and cultural knowledge than outside academics. Additionally, academia and higher education are still plagued by systemic inequities which yield a primarily White, middle- and upper-class demographic. Yet focus group participants often feel more comfortable with facilitators of similar backgrounds, which can improve the quality and utility of data. As such, it was decided that Chicago Grows Food (CGF) staff would facilitate the focus groups: (1) in order to build sustainable evaluation capacity, and (2) because the academic partners did not reflect the diversity of the population that CGF serves.
In preparation for a formative evaluation at CGF, staff who were interested in serving as focus group facilitators were recruited. The academic partner (i.e. Taylor Swenski), who is a community psychology PhD student, delivered an hour-long Zoom training, covering basic focus group theory, uses for focus group data, the skills and steps necessary for facilitating a focus group, and practice simulations. The academic partner was able to deliver the training successfully in this shortened format, with staff suggesting that the practice simulations were particularly useful. The pre-existing organizational value placed on evaluation also aided the overall process. Through informal feedback, the academic partner learned that improvements could be made, including more tailoring to pre-existing knowledge, timing the training closer to the scheduled focus groups, and creating more space for discussion through reducing the theory section. The community partner (i.e. Kenneth Varner), who continued planning and carrying out the evaluation alongside the academic partner, learned that there are additional considerations to be taken into account when conducting the same evaluation in different languages. When conducting focus groups, it is important that participants are asked the same questions. Extra steps must be taken to make sure that the true sentiment of the question is carried over during translation.
This presentation is directly relevant to evaluation practice as it demonstrates how graduate students and early career evaluators can build capacity for facilitating focus groups in a manageable, quick, and culturally-responsive manner. It will impart lessons learned not only from an academic partner, but also from a community partner who served as a facilitator. This presentation also provides support for recording facilitation training events so that community organizations may retain the information for future capacity building purposes, thus contributing to evaluation sustainability. In all, working alongside community organizations to build facilitation skills can transfer decision-making power from academics to community partners in a manner that is not overly taxing for under-resourced non-profits.