Youth Focused Evaluation

Hello! We, Tabitha Sarkar, a young woman co-researcher and international business student in Amsterdam, and Selina Keya,  a young professional evaluation associate with Elevating Voices with Change and The Mangrove Collective, worked with young women co-researchers in Bangladesh as part of the RiseUp! Asia Pacific Formative Evaluation. RiseUp! is a flagship initiative of World YWCA, in partnership with the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, designed to strengthen young women’s leadership and advocacy across Asia and the Pacific.

Keya, as an evaluation navigator, partnered with YWCA Bangladesh to design and guide the evaluation, engaging RiseUp! alumni, like Tabitha, as young women co-researchers. Keya trained and coached the co-researchers to lead data collection, co-analysis, and facilitate a sensemaking workshop.

Greetings! We are Elaine Stavnitzky, Founder and Chief Navigator of Elevating Voices for Change and Kimberley Teillet-Meunier of the Mangrove Collective.

Over the past year, World YWCA commissioned us to lead the RiseUp! Asia Pacific Formative Evaluation. Together with Dr. Suchi Gaur and Victoria Kahla, Senior Director of Strategy and Operations and Program Manager for RiseUp! respectively, we co-designed the evaluation process with an intergenerational Steering Committee of RiseUp! Asia Pacific leaders and representation from Australian government. RiseUp! Young Women’s Leadership and Advocacy Initiative in Asia and the Pacific is a flagship initiative of World YWCA, in partnership with the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade gender equality initiatives.

Hi, my name is Holly Gavin and I am a Project Coordinator at Indiana University Southeast’s Applied Research and Education Center(AREC). Partnering with community and supporting the development of young professionals is at the heart of our work, so we were excited to embark on a new innovation in our evaluation of a youth program – hiring youth to join the evaluation team. Today, I’ll be reflecting on our experiences and how we engaged youth as evaluators in our project.

My name is Dr. Nicole Tirado-Strayer and I work for a nonpartisan research organization called WestEd. The youth-centered evaluations I lead involve partnering with young people to make sense of data about their own schools and communities. I evaluate school mental health initiatives, and students’ voices are essential to ensuring that schools provide the mental and behavioral health supports that all students need. Instead of asking students to simply respond to data, we invite them to interrogate it, contextualize it, and present conclusions directly to decision-makers. In this post, I will describe our tips for engaging youth, based on ourYouth Engagement Cohort, that move youth from data reviewers to system influencers.

I’m Elizabeth Cook of Child Trends, writing with Hope Gabikiny and David Floria, who are youth advisors; Morrigan Hunter; and Katherine McLaughlin of Elevatus Training. Last summer, Katherine, Morrigan, and I hosted a six-week sexual health class for 12 young adults with intellectual disabilities. After each class, we held conversations with participants to learn what was working and what needed improvement before a formal evaluation of the program occurs. Hope and David participated in the class and helped us reflect on the experience. We invited them to share what made it easier (or harder) to share their perspectives.

Hi! I’m Santee Ezell, a Mississippi-based evaluator working with Student & Academic Affairs Departments that rely heavily on peer educators. From the beginning of my career, first as a program developer and then as program evaluator, I have focused on topics such as the eight dimensions of wellness, sleep, sexual assault prevention, substance misuse and abuse, and mental health just to name a few.

Hi! We’re Tiffany Wilson, Independent Evaluation Consultant, and Gabriela Magana, Senior Research and Learning Manager at Public Health Advocates. Together, we supported the Neighborhood Change Champions (NCC) program that dared to put data and research tools directly into young people’s hands. NCC was designed to build youth capacity to engage in policy advocacy through leadership, learning, and civic engagement. Through this journey, we discovered the importance of evaluation as a capacity-building tool.  

Hello! We’re Jenna Sethi, Founder, and Clare Eisenberg, Senior Consultant, with Informed Change, a research and evaluation firm that helps youth-serving organizations use data for innovation and storytelling. 

Over the past two years, we’ve developed a Youth-Centered Evaluation Process (YCEP) that blends principles from Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Youth Participatory Evaluation (YPE) with our youth engagement approach (described below). While rooted in YPAR and YPE, our process allows more flexibility because we have found that many organizations experience barriers (e.g., funder requirements, time constraints, youth interests/goals) to conducting YPAR/YPE with fidelity. Our engagement approach supports equitable youth-adult partnership throughout the process.

Hello! We are Rugiyatu Kane, Soukeyna Ouedraogo, and Safyatou Diallo, members of the Senegalese Evaluation Association (SenEval). Today, we’d like to discuss our Programme de Renforcement des Capacités des Évaluateurs Émergents (PRC), which has provided emerging evaluators with mentorship and professional development opportunities. By sharing our experiences, we hope to strengthen mentoring initiatives for evaluators.

Hello! We are Mahnoor and Sal-Sabila (Youth Gravity), and Emilia Gonzalez (a doctoral student at Toronto Metropolitan University and the International and Canadian Child Rights Partnership (ICCRP)’s participatory evaluation lead). We have been involved in conversations about the connections between intergenerational relationships and decolonization in children’s rights. Here, we share some of our personal reflections on decolonizing evaluation, recognizing there are many layers and ways of understanding this complex concept of decolonization.