Hello! This is Lorin Boyce and Lori Zakalik. We are evaluators with Deloitte Consulting LLP working with U.S. federal health agencies to plan, design, and implement program evaluations.
There are many creative and flexible strategies we can employ as evaluators to better engage communities with lived experience. In public health evaluation, often the communities impacted by an issue are comprised of individuals from populations that have been marginalized and can be hard to reach. While engaging these communities can be challenging, their expertise and lived experiences can provide a fuller understanding of public health issues. As evaluators, we often seek new approaches to meaningfully engage community through all phases of the project. Below are suggestions to consider for engaging community and building a foundation of inclusivity into an evaluation.
Engage people with lived experience: Determine the right team and skillset needed for the evaluation, then include budget for adequate staff in proposals and contracts to successfully engage communities with lived experience. This may include staffing individuals with lived experience, providing translation services and materials to report findings back to the community in their language, or conducting research on promising practices for engagement with a community and developing relationships with local trusted advisors. Community health workers are one example of local trusted advisors, and they are uniquely positioned to serve in this role. Consult with staff or other individuals from the community of interest to align resource needs for support services. Support for participation may include childcare, transportation, technology assistance, support for individuals with disabilities, or language translation services. The ability to reach and build trust and safety with individuals that represent the diverse lived experiences of the communities we are addressing is key.
Incentivize community participation: Build in funding for compensation in the proposal and/or project contract. This can help secure resources to compensate individual community members and/or external partners that support recruitment or direct engagement with the community. Individuals with lived experience are providing their time and expertise to improve the evaluation, so it is important to incentivize participation, acknowledge their contribution, and reward them for their time.
Build engagement into the evaluation timeline: When developing an evaluation timeline, incorporate the time needed to build relationships and recruit individuals with lived experience. Allocating time to engage these individuals across all phases of the project from development through dissemination can help guide development of an evaluation that best reflects the community. Sharing back findings that are clear and meaningful is key to help validate results and lead to action.
Evaluate the engagement process: While the strategies suggested above may help engage people with lived experience, only members of the community of interest really know what works best for them. To best engage communities, develop checkpoints throughout the evaluation and ask community members how evaluation strategies are working, what can be done better, or what should be done differently. From there, iterate on the engagement strategies to best fit the needs of the community.
While it may be difficult to incorporate all suggestions at once, incorporating one or two strategies into your next evaluation and soliciting feedback from the community of interest can strengthen engagement with that community and lead to more effective and equitable results. Let us know your strategies for overcoming challenges to engaging community in evaluation.
Rad Resources
- Assessing Meaningful Community Engagement: A Conceptual Model to Advance Health Equity through Transformed Systems for Health
- Who We Are (apha CHW section)
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