Evaluation Project Manager, Community-led Initiatives CAI Buffalo, New York, United States
Abstract Information: Systems change efforts require bringing together many diverse stakeholders, often with different perspectives. Thus, our approaches must acknowledge and consider multiple perspectives to effectively build trust, create a common agenda, and find a shared narrative. Storytelling is a beneficial tool when embarking on this deeper, relational work, especially when addressing deficit-based, “blame and shame” narratives and beliefs. This session will demonstrate how CAI incorporated story into our engagement and evaluation approaches with diverse stakeholders to build trust, strengthen strategies, and authentically incorporate community feedback and voice into two of our Buffalo, NY-based projects – REACH and HOPE Buffalo. Participants will learn about how we built in opportunities for storytelling and conversation with several community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods, including: • Gallery walks modified for funder site visits, • Collaborative data presentations, and • A listening session format combining strategies from data walks and community cafes.
We will share the benefits of these approaches, including how they maximize the positive influence of evaluation, support shared meaning-making, and allow communities to choose narratives that reflect their reality, are systems-focused, and strengths-based. We will then describe how these story-infused CBPR methods revealed important knowledge and attitudes related to our projects, and how, without stories, we would not have been able to easily learn this information or start a constructive dialogue about the systemic problems affecting health in Buffalo.
Relevance Statement: The importance of storytelling is well-described by a metaphor from The Systems Work of Social Change authors Cynthia Raynor and Francois Bonnici: Stories are like stars, bright, shiny objects that move and inspire us. Narratives, then, are like constellations, a collection of stories, connected together and creating a deeper kind of sense and meaning. These come together to create a galaxy – culture – that is always expanding and evolving and comprises these shared narratives. The process of storytelling can bring us together by reshaping how we see a system and culture. Thus, the role of story in reshaping cultural norms and mental models is invaluable in systems change work.
Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approaches provide opportunities for people with lived experience to share their stories, co-create programs and evaluation strategies, and ultimately, shape narratives that support social change. CBPR strategies that use evaluation to fuel story (and vice versa) also help to enhance the impact of evaluation internally by supporting organizational learning and increasing the use of evaluation methods, and, externally, by changing attitudes toward evaluation (e.g., anxiety and distrust). This demonstration will give participants CBPR tools to incorporate story into activities not traditionally known to focus in this way (e.g., site visits, data/evaluation presentations, and listening sessions). This will provide evaluators with new methods to use and improve their ability to understand the context in their communities. To do this, we will demonstrate how CAI has used story and CBPR approaches to: • Broaden the deficit, behavior-change narrative used by funders to better highlight Buffalo’s context, developing a narrative that better shows the complex systems affecting population health, • Re-frame breastfeeding evaluation results from a compliance narrative to an asset-based, celebratory narrative preferred by the community, • Use data to spark conversations about the factors affecting teen sexual health, including stigma that inhibit learning and sustain deficit-based attitudes, • Advise our communication plans, and • Inform the approaches and narrative of our teen pregnancy prevention project design.
These methods allowed CAI to build new narratives with community input that 1) better addressed systemic barriers to health in Buffalo, 2) presented evaluation results in a way that focuses on community benefit rather than solely demonstrating impact to funders, 3) demonstrated how evaluation is about more than compliance, and 4) emphasized empathy rather than objectivity. Our methods position evaluation as a tool for social justice and health equity – uncovering systemic barriers to health, facilitating shared meaning-making, and creating new narratives that celebrate our community – rather than as a weapon that contributes to enduring deficit-centered beliefs.
References: Raynor, C. & Bonnici, F. (2021.) The systems work of social change: How to harness connection, context, and power to cultivate deep and enduring change. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198857457.001.0001
