Evaluation Café 2024-25
Alissa Marchant
Director
Innovation Network
Shelli Golson-Mickens
Senior Associate
Innovation Network
How to Embed Equity in Your Data Communications
Evaluators hold substantive power and we influence decisions with the way we communicate our data findings. To ensure that our findings support community needs, reduce harm, and reflect the diversity of those communities, evaluators must carefully consider how our audience receives written words and visual presentations of data.
Innovation Network’s Alissa Marchant and Shelli Golson-Mickens will discuss what it takes to communicate equitably. They will share principles for communicating equitably from our Equitable Communications Guide and concrete strategies for applying them to your work.
Deja Taylor
Senior Managing Strategist - Midwest Partnerships
UBUNTU Research & Evaluation
Koren Dennison
Managing Evaluation & Communications Strategist
UBUNTU Research & Evaluation
Asset Mapping for Community Building: An Alternative Dignity-Based Approach to Needs Assessment
This case study presentation will look at a resident-led participatory asset mapping initiative on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side. Facilitators will share insights and outcomes from a 14-month participatory project focused on uncovering community strengths, resources, and priorities to enhance neighborhood safety. This session will highlight the innovative Afrofuturist Evaluation (AFE) methodology used to center Black residents’ voices, experiences, and cultural perspectives throughout the mapping process.
Participants will learn techniques for gathering qualitative, community-driven data on existing assets while revealing gaps needing investment. For instance, approaches like interviews with long-term “Knowledge Keepers” with Black elders as well as amplifying youth voice through "Neighborhood Navigators" and beta-testing with community members to co-develop a digital archive will be covered as participatory practices.
Megan López
Senior Research Associate
Western Michigan University
Advancing Evaluation Capacity Building: Key Insights from Researchers and Practitioners
Over the past two decades, there has been a significant rise in interest in Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB) practice and scholarship. As our commitment to practicing and researching ECB deepens, so too must our understanding of how to effectively evaluate the impact and effectiveness of these efforts. Responding to Bourgeois and colleagues' (2023) call to leverage evaluation for a deeper understanding of meaningful ECB, a forthcoming issue of New Directions for Evaluation, guest edited by Lyssa Wilson Becho and Megan López, brings together practitioners and scholars to explore and share insights on evaluating ECB. This issue features contributions that examine research, theory, methodological approaches, and practical applications in the field. This presentation will highlight the key themes and practical lessons from this collaborative effort, offering valuable guidance for those involved in planning, implementing, or researching ECB. By sharing our findings from this issue, we hope to kickstart conversations and foster ongoing dialogues around the evaluation of ECB and meaningful ECB practices that lead to future innovations and improvements.
Corey Smith, Ph.D.
Director, Health Equity Evaluation
Corewell Health
Nathan Browning MA
Founder and Principal
Kaier Research
Evaluating Health Equity within Healthcare
How do you evaluate a whole strategy? This is the question our health equity evaluation team at Corewell Health has been wrestling for the past 4 years. As an evaluation team we are uniquely situated to play a critical role in helping to provide strategic insights, generate meaningful evidence of value, and support health equity efforts at Corewell as it continues to mature. Corewell Health the largest healthcare system in Michigan with over 65,000 employees, 21 hospitals, and over 300 outpatient sites. In this presentation we will discuss the journey we’ve gone on to answer that critical question of how to evaluate a strategy. Grounded in a commitment to advancing systems-change and with a mission to support strategic decision making we have navigated changes in organizational structure, built up the case for evaluation as a practice, and attempted to operationalize the notion of co-learning (as described by Schwandt & Gates, 2021) as the work continues to eliminate health disparities for our patients and communities. This presentation will include a discussion of how we are situated in the organization and the implications for evaluation, how we are working to move from a program to a portfolio driven approach to evaluation as a way to evaluate strategy, and the opportunities that co-learning has provided us to support our teams mission.
Brandon W. Youker
Evaluation Lab Director
Evaluation Lab
Western Michigan University
Learning through the Lab
At WMU’s Evaluation Lab, undergraduate student-employees receive evaluation-specific training and supervision while working on multiple evaluation projects in the Kalamazoo community. During this Evaluation Café, Dr. Brandon Youker, the Eval Lab's director, will provide an overview of the lab, its structure, and history. A panel of undergraduate student-evaluators will describe their experiences at the lab and its impact on them. They will discuss how the lab engages them in evaluation, empowers them to make decisions, and provides them growth and leadership opportunities. The Q&A portion of the session will allow audience members to learn more about strategies, benefits, and challenges associated with engaging students in evaluation.
Daniela Schröter
School of Public Affairs and Administration
Western Michigan University
Lyssa Wilson Becho
The Evaluation Center
Western Michigan University
Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut
Navigating the Garden of Evaluation Approaches
Join us in this interactive Evaluation Café to explore the Garden of Evaluation Approaches. Together, we will delve into practice dimensions of evaluation to enhance flexibility and intentionality in our evaluative work. Discover how to use the Garden to foster creativity, inclusivity, and practical application, making informed and adaptive choices across diverse evaluation contexts. Explore new additions to the Garden, connect with peers, and walk away with actionable insights and tools to navigate and apply the Garden framework effectively in your practice.
For background, the Garden of Evaluation is a multidimensional, practice-oriented framework that presents a holistic, evolving ecosystem of evaluation approaches. Designed to enhance understanding and communication about evaluation, the Garden organizes and compares approaches across key practice dimensions. The visual representations ("flowers") map each approach by its underlying worldview, research design, and dimensions of values and valuing, context, use, breadth and depth of engagement, power dynamics, and activism for social justice. The expanded Garden now includes additional approaches and maps initial garden areas.
Intended Learning Outcomes:
After this presentation, audience members will
- know the practical dimensions that make up the Garden
- know how they might use the Garden in their own work
- know where to get additional resources (i.e., handouts)
Cherie M. Avent, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Illinois
Unlocking Insights: Approaches to Data Integration and Effective Reporting in Mixed Methods Studies
Many evaluators utilize mixed methods to understand the complexities of social programs. Two important components in a mixed methods study are data integration and communicating the findings/results. Data integration is the intentional combining of qualitative and quantitative findings in a study. Sharing the story or results following integration can present unique and challenging opportunities. Participants of this workshop will learn approaches to data integration based on mixed methods design types. Furthermore, we will discuss strategies for reporting and disseminating mixed methods findings to diverse audiences.
Special in-person event
Karen T. Jackson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor Leadership Studies
North Carolina A&T State University
President, American Evaluation Association
Dr. Jackson's visit marks 13 consecutive years that the current American Evaluation Association has visited Western Michigan University.
Evaluation, Engaging Community, Sharing Leadership
Engaging community and sharing leadership is challenging in stable environments. The volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments evaluators face can create an environment where growth, learning and unlearning occur. Leaders engaging in shared leadership in community listen, share and discuss shared formal and informal ethical agreements and how these agreements interact with the complexities of society and factor into how progress is made. When evaluators apply shared leadership approaches, we accompany groups through a process of sharing communications and information; distributing knowledge, data, and stories that can guide the communities and organizations we’re working with to imagine ways to thrive as we walk into the future together.
This year, there is an additional opportunity to engage:
Connect, Learn, Lead: Elevating Your Evaluation Career Through Service
Following Dr. Jackson’s presentation, you're welcome to stay for dessert, coffee, and dialogue with leaders from the American Evaluation Association, Michigan Association for Evaluation, the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, and the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation. Through a facilitated conversation, you will learn how engaging with these organizations can help you grow your professional network, build your evaluation credentials, and strengthen your leadership skills. You will hear about the leadership pathways of accomplished professionals and discover ways to get involved in the profession locally and nationally. Whether you’re an emerging evaluator or seasoned professional, you’ll leave with fresh ideas and valuable connections for the next leg of your evaluation journey.
Brad Watts
Assistant Director
The Evaluation Center
Western Michigan University
Refreshing the Program Evaluation Standards to Better Serve the Field
The Joint Committee on Educational Evaluation's Program Evaluation Standards (PES) are the official evaluation quality standards in the U.S. and Canada. However, much has changed in the evaluation field since the 3rd edition of the standards was published in 2010. This presentation will share how the committee is addressing some of these changes through refreshed language, new standard statements, and a streamlined format for a forthcoming 4th edition of the PES. Additionally, attendees will learn about how practicing evaluators can contribute to the revision process by serving as field testers.
Sarah Mason
Director, Center for Research Evaluation
University of Mississippi
Err....you're an evaluator? Research on explaining evaluators to non-evaluators
To advance our field, people need to know what evaluation is and why it is of value. However, many evaluators know that it can be difficult to explain what we do to those unfamiliar with evaluation. This presentation explores a series of research studies exploring (a) the general public's understanding of evaluation, and (2) strategies for explaining evaluation to non-evaluators. Sarah will share findings from experiments on how to enhance understanding of evaluation and reflections on building the profile of our profession.