Presenters:
Susan M. Wolfe, PhD
CEO and Community Consultant
Susan Wolfe and Associates

Ann Webb Price, PhD
President
Community Evaluation Solutions


Description:
Community engagement is essential to build trust and rapport needed to engage in genuine participatory evaluation. This interactive workshop will facilitate knowledge sharing among the presenters and participants. Facilitators will discuss participatory evaluation methods that include the voices of community members and help participants understand the qualities, values, and specific capabilities evaluators need to foster community relationships. Participants will learn methods they can use to engage with community members. We will also describe leverage points for engaging the community throughout the evaluation process (collaborative evaluation design, data collection, analysis, and information dissemination strategies).


Learning Outcomes:
After completing this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Use the facilitator's professional development tool provided to identify at least two qualities or capabilities participants will focus on for enhanced professional development.
• Name at least two strategies they will use to engage community participants in evaluation planning, data collection, and data analysis.
• Identify at least two new participatory data reporting and dissemination strategies participants will use in their practice.

Agenda and Learning Strategies:
The facilitators will employ interactive learning strategies during this workshop. All participants will receive a workbook before or at the beginning of this workshop that they will use throughout the workshop to guide the exercises and take notes. The workbook will also include all of the information shared during the workshop. Because the workshop will be comprised of interactive exercises, there will be no slides or lecture presented. The agenda is:

1. Brief Introductions: The facilitators will engage participants in a brief introduction game. This will allow participants to get to know the facilitators and one another.

15 minutes - Interactive Tools: A warm up exercise TBD

2. Qualities, Values, and Capabilities to Foster Community Relationships: Before the workshop the facilitators will share a tool that is useful for exploration of qualities, values, and capabilities for fostering community relationships, and ask participants to read and reflect on it.

40 minutes - Interactive Tool: Participants will spend a brief time re-reviewing the tool and its content and self-reflecting on their current qualities, values, and capabilities. They will be encouraged to think about potential opportunities for self and professional development, and to prepare to share them with the larger group.
Interactive Tool: The presenters will use the Technology of Participation Facilitated Focused Discussion method to facilitate a large group discussion among participants and encourage them to share their thoughts from their reflections, ask questions for clarification, and to share ideas for self- and professional development.

3. Engaging the Community in Evaluation Planning, Data Collection, and Data Analysis: The facilitators will lead participants in exercises to enhance their knowledge of strategies that can be used to engage community members to plan, collect, and analyze quantitative and qualitative data.

50 minutes - Interactive Exercises: The workshop presenters will simulate an exercise that guides participants through a process of evaluation planning, collaborative data collection, and data analysis methods by modeling methods they use to engage community members in these activities.

4. Break - 10 minutes

5. Engaging the Community Members in Sharing and Disseminating Data and Evaluation Results: The facilitators will lead participants to collaboratively report and disseminate data analysis and evaluation results.

50 minutes - Interactive Exercises: The workshop presenters will model processes used that include data parties, data placemats, data walks, and other participative strategies that they use to engage community members to discuss and share data and evaluation outcomes.

6. Questions and Wrap-Up: Final review of the workshop and learning, questions answered, resources shared

15 minutes - Facilitated Discussion: The presenters will facilitate discussion to go over the objectives and determine if they were met; answer questions; and share additional resources.

This workshop is aligned to AEA’s Competencies and Guiding Principles as follows:

1. Professional Practice: Engaging the community effectively requires ethical action that demonstrates integrity and respects people from different cultural backgrounds and indigenous groups. The first segment of the workshop delves into this competency. It also includes identifying personal areas of professional competence and needs for growth through the self-assessment and professional development planning tool that will be shared. It is directly related to how evaluation practice can promote social justice and the public good.

2. Methodology: This workshop shares how various methodologies can be incorporated into participative evaluation processes, including data analysis using credible, feasible, and culturally appropriate procedures. 

3.Context: Participative evaluation practices engage a diverse range of users throughout the evaluation process. The process also naturally facilitates shared understanding of the program and its evaluation with stakeholders, and clarifies diverse perspectives, stakeholder interests, and cultural assumptions while promoting evaluation use and influence in context.

4.Planning and Management: Participatory evaluation works directly with stakeholders to build their evaluation capacity.

5.Interpersonal: The participative methods shared will be useful to foster positive relationships for professional practice and evaluation use, involves listening to understand and engage different perspectives, builds trust throughout the evaluation, attends to the ways power and privilege affect evaluation practice, communicates in meaningful ways that enhance the effectiveness of the evaluation, and facilitates constructive and culturally responsive interaction throughout the evaluation.


Facilitation Experience:
Drs. Wolfe and Price are also experienced and highly-rated facilitators. Both have completed trainings and certifications using the Technology of Participation facilitation methods, and both have been facilitating workshops and conference presentations throughout their careers. They facilitate interactive, participatory sessions that are suited to adult learning. Both are frequent presenters at the American Evaluation Association Conference, AEA's Summer Institute, and have presented at CES for the last two years.


Date:
July 12th, 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM Eastern Time