Hello! My name is Kunga Denzongpa, and I work as an evaluator for the non profit organization, Community-campus partnerships for health (CCPH) that liaises between communities and academic/institutional researchers to engage in responsive community engaged research. My professional background is in public health- community health education, and I was academically trained to do community-engaged research; community based participatory research (CBPR) to be specific. During my doctoral program, I pursued an ethnography focused CBPR among ethnically Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugee women to understand maternal healthcare disparities throughout the continuum of their journey from displacement to resettlement in the US. This experience propelled me to venture into the world of non-profit, and expand my understanding of community engagement in that space.
Lessons Learned
Grant writing in general is a difficult field to navigate for early career professionals because it requires rigorous practice in writing skills, understanding and interpreting grant writing terminologies, and the need to build evidence-based expertise in the field of application. For non-profit organizational staff, the capacity to engage in competitive grants is presented with added challenges of personnel capacity, access to tools and resources to effectively identify appropriate grant funding opportunities in a timely manner, and to navigate academic/institutional determinants of what and who is considered ‘credible’ and ‘rigorous’. In my role as an early career public health professional with an academic training but working in a non-profit space, I quickly recognized the structural challenges of pursuing and securing grant funding for non-profit research.
Particularly, in the evaluation section of grant proposals, we are often restricted to utilizing traditional quantitative methodologies to evaluate a research or a program which does not always center communities in its approach, but they may be deemed more ‘rigorous’, ‘evidence-based’, or ‘validated’ for reviewers. I struggled to effectively incorporate community-centeredness in the proposals while also being able to prove what I proposed would qualify as rigor.
I applied for the AEA MSI fellowship specifically to explore CREE methodology and how I may be able to leverage it into grant writing. CREE as a methodological approach to evaluation that centers equity and inclusion, is a powerful and innovative approach to evaluating community-engaged research programs. Although there are aspects of this approach that I still need to delve deeper into and identify areas that translate effectively into my work, it also requires a bidirectional paradigm shift of how rigor, credibility, and validity are defined in the grant proposal review process. Therefore, I want to open up this space as an opportunity to discuss how to ensure policies and institutions redefine or iterate on their preferences and guidelines of credibility, rigor, and validity that is inclusive of innovative approaches such as CREE.
In closing, I am hopeful that the further I continue to learn and engage with CREE literature, practice, and reflexive implementation of its principles in my non-profit work, the more effective I will become in incorporating CREE in grant writing. I am also hopeful that the more the collective centers CREE in their own work, the more likely we are to bring systemic changes to equitable and inclusive methodological innovations to evaluation.
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