Nonprofit and Foundations
Isaac Castillo, M.S. (he/him/his)
Senior Advisor - Learning and Evaluation
KABOOM!, Maryland, United States
Colleen Coyne, B.A. (she/her/hers)
Learning and Evaluation Specialist
KABOOM!, United States
Location: Room 104
Abstract Information: Playgrounds should serve as a sanctuary for children - an escape where they can just be kids and not have to worry about the real world. But not every child in the United States has access to a safe and high-quality playground. At KABOOM!, we refer to these differences in playspace access and playspace quality as the concept of playspace inequity – and playspace inequity is frequently rooted in systemic racism and intentional disinvestment in communities of color. In this session, the KABOOM! evaluation team will demonstrate how we use the Playspace Inequity Prioritization Index (PIPI) to quantify playspace inequity, allowing us to identify neighborhoods that are likely experiencing the effects of intentional disinvestment. We will then demonstrate how KABOOM! uses our playground quality assessment tools to develop prioritized lists to help policymakers determine where to build new playgrounds. However, even the best data is easy to ignore if evaluators do not develop methods to present findings in clear and understandable ways. Our session will conclude with how we use various presentation methods and maps to help our partners better understand where playspace inequity is happening in their communities.
Relevance Statement: Communities and policymakers often make decisions because they don’t have relevant data in front of them. They don’t know what they don’t know. And sometimes this is a failure of the evaluation community – we struggle at communicating complex issues clearly so they are understood by non-technical audiences. And as evaluators we are frequently taught to stay neutral and ‘let the data speak.’ This presentation will help evaluators better understand how to present complex issues in ways that generate understanding, while at the same time demonstrating how and why evaluators need to be comfortable taking a stand and advocating for what is right. And the presentation will focus on a concept that many people have a connection to: playgrounds. At KABOOM! we work to address the concept of playspace inequity – which is the difference in playspace access and playspace quality across different populations and neighborhoods. Playspace inequity is frequently rooted in systemic racism, as decisionmakers have traditionally made decisions on where to build modern playgrounds based on the loudest voices – and those voices tend to be White and wealthy. Our session will present the methods KABOOM! has developed to quantify playspace inequity for every census tract in the United States, as well as the methods we use to measure the quality of playgrounds. Using these methods, KABOOM! can create prioritized lists that community leaders and decisionmakers can use to make data-based decisions on where to build new playgrounds. We then will demonstrate how we present these prioritized lists to various audiences to ensure understanding of the concept of playspace inequity. We will talk about how we walk the line between ‘letting the data speak’ and being advocates for communities whose voices tend to be ignored. We believe that effective presentation of the data (using maps and other data visualization) techniques is a vital part of our process that frequently is overlooked by evaluators. Evaluation at its heart is figuring out what works and what doesn’t. For playgrounds, the old way of doing things (allowing the loudest voices to pick and choose where new playgrounds get built) doesn’t work for those that would benefit the most from play. In most instances, data doesn’t exist to help inform these decisions. However, even with extensive playground data, the complicated intertwining issues are difficult for non-technical (and busy) audiences to understand. At KABOOM!, we focus on generating great data and on presenting it to non-technical audiences in engaging and informative ways, and that is what we would like to demonstrate in this session.