Join us at the 2024 European Evaluation Society Conference for a solutions-focused workshop on community engagement.
This session will highlight the political nature of evaluation as a social practice, introduce Community Engagement to participants who are unfamiliar with it, and allow more expert audience members to share their ideas and solutions.
As a starting point, the facilitators will draw from experiences with the Wellcome Trust’s approach to engaging communities in health research and science. The facilitators will encourage the audience to engage with the challenges and opportunities of exploring, demonstrating the value of, and evaluating Community Engagement approaches to health.
They will start by posing ‘wicked questions’ to help participants unearth entangled challenges and possibilities in practising and evaluating community engagement that may not be intuitively obvious. Questions may include ‘How might we share learning while making a case to funders?’, ‘How might organisations work in culturally appropriate ways without reflecting or exacerbating power dynamics?”, or ‘How might we work equitably while safeguarding community members from the consequences of subverting power dynamics?’.
Facilitators will then guide participants through a mapping exercise of the goals, views and interests of the social actors involved in Community Engagement in health and its evaluation. Participants will then be divided into small groups, each of whom will represent one of these stakeholder groups. Groups will be tasked with the challenge of devising a high-level evaluation approach to meet the priorities and interests of their chosen stakeholder group.
