The 'P' in our CAPE: Participatory Evaluation - by the community + for the community

A recent book club discussion about the challenge of adult friendships in the present day has had me thinking a lot about the importance of a sense of community.

On that note, a portion of a recent conversation between two of my favorite thinkers, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and writer Anand Giridharadas, really struck me. Surgeon General Murthy shared that statistics show that people now are working more - “and parents are parenting more, even though they’re also working more.” He asks, “Where is that time coming from, that extra time? You put all this together and that time that is eroding is a time that we spend in person with family and friends, the time we spend for ourselves, and the time we spend for our communities.”

On the heels of a community event I helped plan, I’ve also specifically been thinking a lot about what it means to do something “by the community, for the community” (our event tagline).

What does all this have to do with the focus of today’s newsletter, participatory evaluation (aka the ‘P’ in PoP Health’s CAPE)? Let’s get into it!

What do you mean by participatory evaluation?

Simply put, participatory evaluation is monitoring, evaluation, and learning - by the community, for the community.

As more formally defined in this guide, “Participatory evaluation is not top-down or expert-led. It is a bottom-up framework that stimulates and utilizes the wealth of experiences and wisdom that participants have to create more meaningful, productive, and engaging discussions and debates.”

When it comes to the work of community coalitions and collaboratives, we want coalition members as well as community members integrally involved in every stage of monitoring, evaluation, and learning (or MEL, as it’s often called), to the point where they co-own the process, alongside their MEL team.

The idea that participatory evaluation encompasses monitoring, evaluation, and learning is key. Monitoring gets at the idea of continually examining whether things are implemented as planned, and applying what is learned to make improvements along the way. Evaluation gets at the ultimate question of “did it work”. And Learning underscores that the point of all of this is to learn together, and apply what we learn to make things better moving forward.

What are some ways to think about participatory evaluation?

As with action planning, there are hundreds of evaluation frameworks out there.

So instead of sharing or dissecting all of those, I’m going to share PoP Health’s approach to participatory evaluation + one evaluation framework specific to participatory evaluation that we have found helpful.

PoP Health’s Approach to Participatory Evaluation

Community-Driven and Co-Creative: Ensure participants share ownership of the evaluation process. Involve coalition and community members, centering and amplifying their voices in every stage of the process, from developing the plan, evaluation questions, and data collection approaches through interpretation and dissemination of results.

• Equity-Focused and Inclusive: Engage voices that have been historically excluded, emphasizing collective strengths, and maintaining a focus on upstream, root causes of health inequities. Build belonging and civic muscle through an evaluation process that helps participants develop their power to shape their world.

• Taking a Systems-Level Lens: Recognize the powerful role of policy, systems, and environmental change, and make every effort to capture and learn from the impact of changes at those levels. Ensure your evaluation process is also reflective of the dynamic behavior, complexity, and interconnectedness of systems.

• Value-Adding: Build upon ongoing activities and utilize the wealth of existing data and efforts, taking care not to waste time or resources reinventing the wheel. Identify where there is unique value to be added and focus evaluation efforts accordingly.

• Actionable: Generate relevant evidence and translate that evidence into key takeaways and concrete steps that can be taken to continually improve. Build upon assets and facilitators, address challenges, and proactively pursue transformative change that is guided by the experiences, stories, and voices of participants.

CoAct's Principles of Co-Evaluation

CoAct is focused on Citizen Social Science, which they define as follows:

Citizen Social Science combines equal collaboration between citizen groups (co-researchers) that are sharing a social concern and academic researchers. Such an approach enables [us] to address pressing social issues from the bottom up, embedded in their social contexts, with robust research methods. We aim to co-create socially robust knowledge.

They offer six principles of co-evaluation, each of which is further defined and paired with practical recommendations here.

What questions should I be asking myself about how we engage in participatory evaluation?

• What will coalition members and community members gain through the process? What new understanding, capacity, connections, resources, supports, etc. might they walk away with? ​

• How can we meaningfully co-own each stage of the monitoring, evaluation, and learning process with community members, while also being respectful of their time and other constraints?

• How can we make sure our continuous monitoring is part of a feedback loop that feeds directly into making concrete improvements?

• How do we best capture the impact that matters most to each of our audiences - community members, coalition members, policymakers, funders, and so on?

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