Guest blog post is co-written by Celeste Gasperik, Roxana Aguilar, and Jenna Cobb, and is being shared on eePRO with the writers' permission.

The Beginning (May–September, 2023)

• Learning about the eeVAL
• Learning about the values
• Meeting our team
• Understanding our roles
• Floating ideas

Reflecting back to the beginning of the eeVAL Deep Evaluation Learning Journey (DELJ) early last year is like trying to recall a formative childhood memory; I know I’m different because of it, but there’s a murkiness to the timeline and details. Our team approached the opportunity knowing we wanted to be doing evaluation and doing it equitably, but we didn’t have a clear shared concept of what that might look like. What started out as a feeling of impatience around the perceived lack of structure and a shallow understanding of the values, slowly and painstakingly transformed into the intentional spaciousness necessary for ideas to seed and grow, grounded by the guiding values that held us accountable to each other and to working on evaluation with equity in mind.

Building relationships and trust with our team to the point where we were able to forge a path and collaborate toward a shared goal proved challenging. Even so, navigating this challenge as a team allowed us to build a stronger bond and foundation for our work. As we pushed ourselves to put our trust in the process, the values of Shared Learning and Equity in Motion provided the guidance we sought that allowed us to begin to define and redefine our focus.

Prioritizing Values & Setting Intentions (September, 2023–January, 2024)

• Deepening curiosity
• Integrating CREE values with organizational values
• Intentional focus on authentic engagement
• Setting goals and timelines/ determining roles
• Bringing in the Community Nature Connection (CNC) team

Our eeVAL team roles evolved throughout the journey as we each gained a deeper curiosity for each other’s values and began to build our team goals while contributing to the process with compassion and understanding. Early on we voiced the need to incorporate multiple voices into our program design and evaluation methods through intentional engagement and qualitative data analysis. Our team focused on redefining the quality of our engagement with each other through intentional dialogue, transparency around our evaluation skill levels, and explored evaluation methods that consisted of genuine care for community members and participant voices. We grappled with a perceived lack of formal structure throughout the journey while being flexible and open to challenging ourselves in the process of searching for equitable frameworks. We realized there was a gap of equitable frameworks in traditional evaluation and our journey began to fill that gap as we incorporated feedback from the eeVAL team. The eeVAL leadership team was available to provide insight and feedback as we found synergy between the eeVAL values and CNC’s organizational values. This led to an intentional deep dive and refinement of our equitable qualitative methods.

Reframing the DELJ as a shared learning journey rather than a training program with a final product made room for curiosity, exploration, deep thought, and intentionality in our group. The team set an intention to incorporate diverse voices through authentic engagement by including the eeVAL team, eeVAL leads, CNC staff, CNC participants, and alumni in the process. Our team aimed to gain a better understanding of participants' connection to nature and how they define nature for themselves. In the last half of our evaluation journey, we were on our way to accomplishing this through collaborative focus group facilitation training for our staff, implementation of focus groups, and qualitative data analysis.

Focus Groups & Teamwork (January–April, 2024)

• Working with the team
• Working with the program leads
• Focus Group training session
• Focus group guide creation
• Focus group implementation

Once our project plans solidified, there was an instinct to rush the process. We only had four months before the official eeVAL Deep Journey Partnership ended, and we needed to train our staff in leading focus groups, recruit for and implement the focus groups, and analyze our data! However, remembering the value of Authentic Engagement, we decided to prioritize genuine relationships and adjust our evaluation timeline accordingly. We recruited a few youth evaluation advisors who gave input on our focus group questions. Also, we practiced going at the speed of trust with our staff and internal evaluation project team. During our first staff focus group training with our emerging evaluators Charissa Jones and Cassandra Backman, our staff brought up some tough questions about how to run culturally responsive and equitable focus groups. Cassandra and Charzy were very responsive to their questions, sharing many resources and dedicating a large portion of our second training to continue addressing staff members’ questions.

Our focus on Authentic Engagement led to the youth participants of our focus groups feeling comfortable and enjoying the experience. One participant shared, “I like all the dialogue that we had, the questions and everything, like it made it seem like we weren't just in here. It felt like we were actually doing something.” Staff also had positive experiences with many excited to apply this evaluation process to their own programs.

The Journey Continues

• Where do we go from here?
• Bringing the values with us
• Continuing to share the learning with our team

Even though the eeVAL DELJ has reached its conclusion, our work on equitable evaluation continues. In our effort to create a space within our organization to carry forward this work, we founded an evaluation committee and invited any members of our team who are interested in continuing in shared learning and work on equitable evaluation to join. This summer and fall, we aim to upskill ourselves and complete the thematic analysis and coding of our qualitative data and produce a visualization of our findings that we can share with our stakeholders. As we continue this work, we intend to continue our engagement with the eeVAL values, especially of shared learning and deep curiosity.