Collaborative, Participatory & Empowerment Evaluation
Sara McGarraugh, MPP (she/her/hers)
Director of Consulting
The Improve Group
St. Paul, Minnesota, United States
Location: White River Ballroom E
Abstract Information: As evaluators, we have the privilege of hearing people’s stories. With this privilege comes a responsibility to be respectful, trustworthy, and, we argue, reciprocal. As the evaluator has a better understanding of their self and story, it brings a better awareness of how biases and limitations in cultural understanding may impact the work. We see multiple reasons to work to understand ourselves and tell our own stories as part of evaluation: to be transparent about our values and what we prioritize; to acknowledge that we bring our own identities and experiences of privilege and oppression; and to model vulnerability and openness ourselves before we request it of people from whom we are collecting data. At times we even become characters the stories we seek to document and understand with many participants needing to know who we are in order to trust us with their knowledge. When we work with clients or community members whose participation in the work can have negative impacts on them, or put them in a vulnerable position, they may need to know who we are to feel safe and comfortable in opening up to us. In this Birds of a Feather session, we will hear from each other about how we have told our own stories as organizations and individuals; why we have been motivated to do so; what has happened as a result; and where we are uncertain about sharing our stories.
Relevance Statement: AEA competency 2.10 is “Collects data using credible, feasible, and culturally appropriate procedures.” Telling our own stories as evaluators can make data collection more credible and more culturally appropriate. By expressing the values that guide us, we establish credibility with clients and community members. (This also serves to set expectations with clients—especially for when we may push them to be more equitable.) As the evaluator has a better understanding of their self and story, it brings a better awareness of how biases and limitations in cultural understanding may impact the work. The evaluators must be able to communicate these limitations in a way to the client that fosters an environment of openness and mutual understanding. By creating open communication, the evaluators allows the client to be better understood and represented in the data. As a small evaluation firm, The Improve Group has told its stories, and our consultants have told theirs, in different ways. Through marketing we emphasize our values of shared leadership and a commitment to equity. For example, we recently transitioned to being a worker-owned cooperative and used storytelling to explain why. With clients, putting ourselves out there can set an expectation that we will prioritize, for example, resource allocation based on our commitment to equity. We are also noticing more RFPs requesting information about why individual team members are drawn to work, and what they will bring to a project based on their lived experience—not just their degree or past project experience. This is because the evaluation field has increasingly recognized that evaluators are not neutral observers but instead bring our own identities and experiences of privilege and oppression to our work. Within projects, we are facing more opportunities to tell our story. We acknowledge the land we are on in recognition of the history of attempted genocide of Tribal Nations. In these cases, we tell individual personal stories—referencing our own ancestors’ history with land as it relates to Indigenous peoples. When we begin a project, we might explain why we are drawn to a given evaluation, to expand how much of ourselves we are bringing to the work. We look forward to an opportunity to hear from others about how they have grappled with questions like: • Why is it important to tell our own stories as part of evaluation? • When is it important to tell our own stories? When might it be inappropriate? Does it depend—on the topic? The evaluator’s identity? The client? • Where does discomfort come from when we are invited to talk about ourselves? What are ways our fellow evaluators have overcome that? Drawing on this trend and from similar concepts in other fields, like researcher positionality in the academic world, this Birds of a Feather will provide opportunities to learn from how we have shared our own stories, and to what end.