Data Democratization and Community-Centering through Evaluation Research: A Case Study from the Field

Background and Purpose: Historically evaluation research has been used to inform decisions around policy, programing, and funding as it is often used to report programmatic findings to federal, state, and foundation funders. However, evaluation research is seldom used as a tool for community-level capacity building and data sharing. The purpose of this proposal is to offer a case study example of how researchers can use evaluation as a strategy to support the development of new partnerships, elevate the experiences of community members, and center community knowledge and power.

Methods: This case study is based on a multi-year evaluation project that examined the COVID-19 capacity building of several grassroots organizations across the United States. This project was led by a national training center that distributed the funds to many community-based organizations that focused on working with less resourced communities across the United States regions and Puerto Rico. The evaluators were invited to join this project to support the evaluation efforts and assist with organizational capacity building and strategic planning. The results shared were based on findings from the second year of the project that spanned from September 2022- July 2023.

Results: Results from this case study highlight the importance of moving towards utilizing community-centered strategies in response to public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the evaluation strategy, the evaluators met with the TA agency (grantee) as well as the sub-recipients to provide evaluation training and provided agencies with various evaluation tools such as surveys as well as focus group and interview guides. Following this training, all subrecipients conducted their own community inquiry process that informed the next stages of the project. Majority of findings from the community inquiry process highlighted COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy due to misinformation based on vaccination myths, lack of access to COVID-19 information in local languages, religious beliefs, and lack of access to vaccination clinics. Through funding community health workers, collaborating with local faith-based organization, departments of health, and education institutions combined with the support of the TA organization and guided by evaluation data, the subrecipient agencies developed COVID-19 related products such as flyers, short movies, documentaries, social media posts to increase awareness of COVID-19 vaccination and side-effects. These products were created in local languages and disseminated by community health workers at various community events. These efforts ultimately resulted in an increase in COVID-19 vaccination rates as well as subrecipients capacity to respond to future emergencies.

Conclusions and Implications: While community-centered practices have been used for generations across many communities, the majority of Federal, States, and foundation funders shy away from adapting a community-centered evaluation approach. Data from this case study highlights an important role evaluation researchers can take in recentering knowledge and power in communities by utilizing evaluation strategies that are designed around collaborating with community organizations to strengthens existing community assets and resources and take a strengths-based approach.