CC Week: Karen Anderson on Integrating Cultural Competency into Organizations

I’m Karen Anderson, AEA’s Diversity Coordinator Intern, and in this role I support AEA’s diversity programs, TIGs, and the AEA Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation Dissemination Working Group.

The baton has been passed from the Cultural Competence in Evaluation Task Force, the Statement developers, to the Cultural Competence in Evaluation Dissemination Working Group to translate the Statement from paper to practice. One strategy for its broader dissemination and use is integrating the Statement into the policies and procedures of organizations that conduct and commission evaluations.

The AEA Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation has several core concepts, including the implications culture has for all phases of evaluation, including staffing of evaluation efforts and ensuring that members of the evaluation team collectively demonstrate cultural competence in the context for each evaluation. How does an evaluation practitioner or commissioner begin to do this?

Rad Resource:

• The Organizational Cultural and Linguistic Competency Assessment Tool  can be used to assess where organizations and individuals fall along the cultural competence spectrum, and to serve as a guide to identify training needs and areas to improve upon.

Hot Tips:

• Share the Statement and supplemental resources like Building Culturally Competent Organizations, Key Components to a Culturally Competent System, and It All Starts At The Front Desk with human resources and decision makers in organizations. Recommend the development of a cultural competence committee to monitor and make recommendations for policy revision, program development, and evaluation.
• Include cultural competence language in the development and response to requests for proposals (RFPs). Check out this post How to Spot a Lip Service Approach to Culturally Responsive Evaluation from Patricia Rogers and Jane Davison’s Genuine Evaluation blog for tips on pointing out when a client may not be walking the walk in relation to culture and program development, theory, and evaluation.
• If you or other employees at your organization belong to an AEA affiliate, organize an event at your office around the theory or practical applications of the Statement. The Atlanta Area AEA affiliate group hosted one recently, Taking a Stance Toward Culture: Cultural Competence in Evaluation. Reflections from the event can be found in the AEA Newsletter diversity article.
• Set up a series of lunch and learns to begin having dialogue with colleague to increase awareness and to encourage relationship building, or start a book club discussion using the Statement, and branch out to other reading material to light the spark for cultural competence in evaluation.

The American Evaluation Association will be celebrating Cultural Competence Week. The contributions all this week come from the Cultural Competence committee. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluator.