Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
My name is Molly C. O’Connor, and I am the founder of Coco Canary Consulting, a Creative Evaluation & arts-based methods firm based in St. Paul, MN (the ancestral lands of the Dakota people). In 2023, I completed a Seattle-based Creative Evaluation & Community Engagement project with Sully Moreno, a community engagement specialist from Culture Shift Consulting. I want to share three lessons I learned from this project that I will take with me going forward.
Lessons Learned
1. If your project includes engaging with community, consider hiring a community engagement specialist
I have worked on many projects (both as an internal and external evaluator) where engaging with the community was an important element. However, it wasn’t until working with Sully that I learned a valuable lesson: community engagement is an art form, and I am not an expert! With her guidance and community-centric approach, we recruited a community advisory board and nearly 60 community members for our community feedback sessions! Our project went so smoothly compared to other community projects I worked on, and I attribute a lot of it to the expertise and trust a community engagement specialist brings.
2. Art-based methods allow for deeper and more authentic discussion, especially when working in community
Having a community engagement specialist gave me the time and space to fully lean into my expertise—creative evaluation approaches and art-based methods. With the help of poetry and storytelling, we helped participants get into creative and embodied places, which allowed them to give us such rich, heartfelt, and beautiful data. These meetings were also effective thanks to Sully’s connections, such as local simultaneous interpretation contractors (in Spanish and Oromo).
3. If you want to work in community, especially communities of color, you need to do your personal DEAI & self-liberation work
For those who don’t know me, I am a queer white cis-woman with Irish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Scottish ancestry. And something important to note is that all of our participants and community partners were people of color, and a majority were first- or second-generation immigrants for whom English was their second, third, or fourth language. I was often the only white person in the room (Zoom and IRL), and more than once, project partners and community members asked me earnestly why they should trust me. Specifically, because I was a white person from out of town assisting the government in collecting information from them. 5 years ago, being asked that question so directly would have freaked me out. But now, after years of deep personal DEAI work (and therapy!), I could respond honestly, share examples of why they can trust me, and freak out a lot less. 😉
Conclusions
Overall, what I took away from this project is:
- If I ever need to collect data with and from community members, I will seek out the expertise of a Community Engagement Specialist.
- Arts-based methods are a fantastic tool to use when you want to collect data in fun, connecting, and heart-centered ways.
- Doing your internal work is essential if you want to work in community, especially with communities that have been historically excluded.
Rad Resources
- Want to learn more about Creative Evaluation
- Johnson, N.M. & Johnson, A. R. (2022). Creative Evaluation and Engagement: Essentials (Vol 1). Inspire to Change.
- Check out Coco Canary’s Creative Evaluation Resource Page
- Want to learn more about Arts-Based Methods?
- AndImplementation’s blog is a goldmine of wisdom
- There is so much literature! An author to start with is Patricia Leavy:
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 evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.