Equitable Evaluation Funding Realities: A Call to Action
By: Paola Molina, PhD
Director of EDI
By: Jean Denious, PhD
Chief Executive Officer
Those of us practicing equitable evaluation are challenged to ask ourselves how we can better include the people who have been kept at the margins of society and conduct research that reflects their experiences. Equitable evaluation practices (see this useful overview of evaluation philosophies and approaches that center cultural responsiveness and equity) are increasingly being recognized as essential to conducting our work in a responsible, ethical manner and generating valid learnings. It means respecting community members’ needs, time, and contributions; and never letting these core considerations stray from the fore. It means ensuring accessibility, inclusivity, and community ownership in the research process.
To give just a few examples, it is imperative for evaluators to:
Pay people for their time; ideally cash, but if not possible, useful forms of payment such as gift cards to establishments/stores that are local and culturally relevant. This is not (just) about incentivizing participation, it’s about recognizing the value of people’s time and wisdom even if given without expectations.
Actually make it possible for people to participate. This means considering the day, time, location, accessibility, safety/trust/familiarity of the setting or venue, etc. It means ensuring transportation and coverage of childcare needs. And it means deploying multiple methods and modes of data collection, since no one approach works best for everyone.
Meaningfully and authentically engage communities in the evaluative process. This includes in the reviewing, sense-making, and interpreting of emerging findings to ensure multi-culturally valid conclusions and implications are being drawn, particularly regarding systems-level factors that present key barriers or opportunities. These systems-level factors are the levers that must be engaged to effect real change and are the responsibility of funders, policymakers, and practitioners to address.
Disseminate the results of the work back to the community, and in a way that is accessible. This may require that additional, different types of ‘deliverables’ be produced beyond what the client originally specified. People deserve to know what came out of their efforts, and what is going to be done with the knowledge they contributed.
Each of these essential practices requires time and resources to implement.
Yet, too often we see requests for proposals issued by prospective clients that demand equitable, community-centered approaches to evaluation (good!), and maybe even further specify multiple sub-populations to be engaged (even better!), but utterly fail to provide or allow for what is necessary to do this. For example, often we see:
Project timelines that are unreasonably compressed so as to ensure completion by end of the fiscal year or other looming deadlines for ‘use it or lose it’ funds.
Allocated budgets that are insufficient to support meaningful and compensated engagement with the community. And it is truly rare that we see budgets take into account cash incentives and expenses for things such as food, child care, and transportation (these may even be completely disallowed).
We know that governments, in particular, may be held to multiple competing requirements that make it difficult, if not impossible, to circumnavigate these constraints. They may be held to legislative mandates to produce reports in time for session, and to federal funding guidelines that prohibit the use of funds in ‘discretionary’ ways that cannot be clearly tracked and documented. Nonetheless, if stewards of our public dollars are truly committed to advancing equity and doing right by our communities, something has to give!
In our intermediary role as evaluators, we are often relegated to the difficult choice of either foregoing the opportunity altogether (with lingering concern regarding how the work will ultimately be conducted), or shouldering the funding burden ourselves by investing unpaid staff time and other resources to ensure the work gets done equitably under the constraints imposed. We’ve done this enough times to know it’s possible, but not sustainable, as it strains our financial resources and puts the burden of excess hours on our staff.
At OMNI, we see ourselves as social change agents, with a responsibility to continue building our internal infrastructure and well of resources to support equitable approaches to research, evaluation, and capacity-building. Through the development of more innovative strategies and long-term investments in equitable practices, we are striving to grow and improve ourselves and our work. However, we cannot grow in a vacuum. We also need funders to do their part by meaningfully and sufficiently funding and allocating the time for this work. A wonderful quote by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is “Equitable evaluation can render power to the powerless, offer voice to the silenced and give presence to those treated as invisible”, but this is only achievable when we all put our money where our mouths are.