Webinar Resources

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Kien Lee: Good afternoon. Good evening, good morning, everybody. Wherever you are welcome to the Webinar place, is not an afterthought. The missing piece in effective strategies and evaluation.

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Kien Lee: Place-based grant making is not the same thing as making grants in a place. Something that my friend William Buster said once that left a profound impact on me. And it really made me continuously think about what does place mean, and what about a place makes it unique?

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Kien Lee: And what do you have to consider in your strategies and evaluation when you work in a place that led to this webinar, because over the years of evaluating place-based work I frequently hear people talk about place.

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Kien Lee: as it’s just a context that it influences the outcomes. Not always that there are outcomes in the place in of itself. And so I decided to gather my 2 colleagues, Amber trout and Corian Skelly, to have this webinar to have us talk a little bit about what does place mean in our work.

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Kien Lee: So today’s takeaways.

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Kien Lee: 3 things next slide, please.

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Kien Lee: Understanding places more than a contextual variable

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Kien Lee: key things about a place to pay close attention to. There’s a lot of them, but there are a few that we find over and over again are important to really pay close attention to and tools to support understanding and measuring change in place.

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Kien Lee: Again, there are many, many tools, and we’re just going to share a couple of them here on this webinar

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Kien Lee: next slide, please. As I mentioned, I’m here today with my wonderful colleagues, Corianne, Scali, and Amber trout, both principal associates at Community Science.

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Kien Lee: We are a small business here, headquartered in Maryland. These are our wonderful people, and we work with governments, foundations, and nonprofit organizations on solutions, to social problems through community and other systems changes.

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Kien Lee: This webinar is brought to you by the equitable community development practice area at community science.

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Kien Lee: Our equitable community development practice area. It places importance of where people live

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Kien Lee: from the smallest towns to the largest cities, and what is accessible to them in that place we find that what’s accessible are shaped by decades of policies, practices, and narratives that help some communities thrive while harming others.

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Kien Lee: At community science. Our equitable community development practice aims to transform systems and ensure fair access to opportunities and resources for all people, especially those who have historically faced biases that limited their access. We study and generate evidence-based policies and practices that remove systemic barriers, mobilize the collective strengths of the people, like their culture and their creativities. Social connectedness, entrepreneurship and innovation and their grit

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Kien Lee: and center community voices in the solutions.

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Kien Lee: We’re going to start with a story, and then Corianne will share her story, and Amber will share hers. Last about a place. I will start with this place that I encountered and worked in, where, historically it was that early French Canadian settlers worked. There they settled there to work in the paper mills and factories and emerge over time as the political and economic power brokers.

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Kien Lee: This community had a large mural that depicts the history and story of the early French Canadian settlers, which also meant that the recent newcomers were not illustrated in this mural, and it was a constant reminder every day that they were not the settlers of this place.

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Kien Lee: There’s also a geographic divide in this community that separates the upper and lower parts of the neighborhood, and it was literally a hill.

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Kien Lee: The economic forces in this community changed over the years from the time when it was a, you know, thriving paper mill town with a lot of manufacturing to then major economic decline over time, and this economic decline coincided with what the community observed as an influx of newcomers, primarily blacks and Latino families into the community

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Kien Lee: as such narratives created, where the neighborhood residents in the upper side of the hill, on the higher side of the hill on top of the hill, perceive that those who live in the lower part, which were occupied primarily by Latino families as dangerous and dirty.

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Kien Lee: and the neighborhood residents, primarily the Latino families who lived in the lower part of the hill at the bottom of the hill did not feel welcomed in the upper side of the hill right, which was occupied by descendants of the French Canadian settlers and black families of higher socioeconomic status.

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Kien Lee: So what was the strategy that was taken to create the sense of community. Primarily a community organizing strategy. A community organizer went door knocking on the doors of residents both in the upper and lower side of the neighborhood, to really identify what were their concerns. And there were lots of concerns. 2 of these really floated up to the top. There was a lack of sidewalks.

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Kien Lee: and it forced children to walk to school on the streets or wait for their school bus on the street, and parents, no matter where they lived on the upper side, lower side. What their socioeconomic status was, what their racial background was. They were concerned for their children’s safety. There were also no speed bumps or stop signs to help enforce speed limit, which also again they felt was a danger to their children’s safety.

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Kien Lee: So what they did was they brought people, together with perceived differences, to exchange their stories and use interpretation, assistance, to allow residents who are monolingual Spanish, speaking Spanish, speaking, monolingual Spanish speaking families, allow them to be able to connect

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Kien Lee: and to exchange the stories with English speaking residents, and vice versa. These connections, and these common concerns that encourage the residents to share their issues with the local elected officials, and at the same time there was technical assistance to help build the leadership capacity to bridge and build community here.

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Kien Lee: The accomplishments were great. So in a year the community sorry. Next slide, please.

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Kien Lee: In a year this community was able to achieve some great things. The police department established a rotating detail, stationed a police officer at different bus stops on each day of the week

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Kien Lee: there were new sidewalks that were actually built on 2 streets where children had to walk to schools. These streets were also given increased lighting Latino families were actually introduced to and welcomed in a traditional American civic institution that they had never stepped foot into.

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Kien Lee: and the perception that the local community center, which was actually located at the bottom of the hill. The perception that because it was located at the bottom of the hill and therefore served only Latino families shifted to actually serving all residents.

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Kien Lee: So one of the takeaways from this experience is the importance of conducting an annual community capacity assessment. This community succeeded because it had strong community organizing abilities. There was a team of people there who were from the community who were trained community organizers who were able to go and make those connections. So the capacity community capacity assessment is something that community science has done. And what it means is that you’re really assessing

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Kien Lee: the organization’s ability to perform functions that essential for place-based change. So the organizations that reside in that community and that support that community or that place can be assessed on their ability to do things like bridging across differences, community organizing community outreach and engagement

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Kien Lee: advocacy and cross-sector collaboration. The measure is actually a very simple one. There’s a set of 6 responses that are used in the assessment they are. We don’t know how to do this at all. So if let’s say it’s community organizing. The answer is, we don’t know how to do community organizing at all. We’ve started to develop some skills in community organizing. We’re doing okay. But we can do better.

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Kien Lee: were able to do it really. Well.

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Kien Lee: we know everything we need to know, and can actually teach others.

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Kien Lee: or that this capacity is actually not applicable to our needs or what we’re trying to do. And you can then score these different capacities and then come up with a composite score by capacity and overall. And what you see in this

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Kien Lee: quick chart here is just that there is a cohort of organizations that we could could kind of be the standard for that whole, for all the measures. And then you have the measure of the different organizations, and then you could do it over time annually to see if those capacities improved or changed or declined over time.

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Kien Lee: So this is something that we’ve done, and this is a key takeaway for the type of place-based change we’ve been evaluating in terms of being able to assess really community readiness in many ways.

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Kien Lee: And that’s the end of story A. And with that I’m going to turn it to Corianne to begin story B.

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Corianne Scally: Thanks so much. Ken. Hi, everyone! A few years ago I had the opportunity to lead a process and evaluation process and outcomes evaluation of the construction of a tiny homes community. In Bozeman, Montana the community was developed to serve as permanent supportive rental housing for individuals and families in the community who are experiencing homelessness and other challenges.

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Corianne Scally: And so today, I’m going to walk through some of the salient characteristics of of the city and how it affected the outcomes for that project’s process and development.

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Corianne Scally: So 1st was natural resources as Kian has already described. Understanding what people value most about their community is critical. And in Bozeman it’s often the mountains, and it’s the ability to see and experience the mountains from where you live.

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Corianne Scally: And this ends up. Then, being reflected in the local zoning and land use restrictions that help optimize views and keep buildings low and spread out so that everyone can enjoy the space.

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Corianne Scally: Another important part of the of the place is the availability and cost of land for the purposes of this land and property development project.

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Corianne Scally: despite what looks like in a visible abundance of land, there’s actually not much available for development. Most of the land is actually already developed is being held for other purposes, often by large anchor institutions, such as a hospital and university in town, or is lacking easy access to infrastructure that really supports development.

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Corianne Scally: So high competition for the remaining properties has driven up prices over time.

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Corianne Scally: Bozeman had also recently completed a housing needs assessment showing the need for new housing in the community prior to our

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Corianne Scally: engagement in this work and in this housing plan the city had acknowledged that some of the new housing that was needed in the community should target

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Corianne Scally: folks with the lowest incomes, including those who were experiencing homelessness in the community, and this acknowledgement by the city helped open the door for the community to consider expanding its housing supply to meet the needs of this marginalized population, and also open the door to tiny home development.

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Corianne Scally: and finally the narratives, of course, that were circulating in place were important to understand and work within. There were assumptions in the local community that people with low incomes were not working, and that they were not working by choice when the reality was that usually they were working if they could.

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Corianne Scally: There were also strong perceptions that people experiencing homelessness in the community were not actually from the city and were not working. But the experiences of the service providers in the city serving these individuals and families showed that they had often been in the community for multiple years, and many were working, and simply could not afford the rental housing available in town.

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Corianne Scally: So project. Stakeholders used many strategies to foster community ownership around building a tiny home village next slide, please.

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Corianne Scally: First, st a trusted lead organization, the local community action agency and homeless services. Provider helped bring partners together to support the tiny home village in multiple ways.

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Corianne Scally: Second, the lead organization met individually with neighboring property owners of the site that they purchased for the tiny homes community.

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Corianne Scally: They brought together a working group to strategize around, messaging to the broader public and not just those in the community who already supported the project.

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Corianne Scally: and finally, they also prioritize community ownership of the development through engaging volunteers in project fundraising and actually in constructing some of the homes to help really boost civic pride and engagement in the work.

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Corianne Scally: and last, but not least, when certain types of development are not explicitly allowed in the current zoning code.

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Corianne Scally: You need updates to help make those explicitly available. So the lead organization worked with the city planning division to update zoning regulations and processes to allow shelters and permanent supportive housing in more zones, and also to allow tiny homes

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Corianne Scally: which are a very unique type of housing, and this helped alleviate requirements for community review by allowing this development as of right, and it also minimized the channels available for community opposition to the tiny homes

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Corianne Scally: in terms of accomplishments. We see by the picture on the next slide

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Corianne Scally: that at the end of our study period there were 12 beautiful tiny homes constructed and completed, and there were 7 more in progress with volunteer help.

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Corianne Scally: The 1st homes were also successfully leased to individuals and families experiencing homelessness in the community, and they had the ability to access wraparound services to support their needs.

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Corianne Scally: And while you’ll notice that these homes were located in a commercial district rather than a strictly residential one. This did mean that the village was close to public transportation and jobs in the community where cars are often needed to get around

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Corianne Scally: in terms of takeaways and tips.

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Corianne Scally: Building community takes time. Trust and collaboration

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Corianne Scally: project planning across the diverse group of partners took 5 years before construction started. While it’s always nice for things to go more quickly. It’s certainly important to balance that with the needs to build the collaboration that you really need to get the work done well for a community

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Corianne Scally: tailored and sustained communications is key to narrative change and narrative change requires taking people’s concerns seriously and engaging in consistent and authentic dialogue. This is especially true in small communities where connections extend far beyond professional working relationships to include running into one another at the grocery store, sharing religious services together

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Corianne Scally: showing up at school, Fung the same school functions and the like.

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Corianne Scally: Engaging community residents directly in solutions helps them to buy in local groups can tap into positive community energy by inviting people to show up physically on site in this case, and really give their time and their energy to be a direct participant in building and implementing community solutions, and not just a passive observer

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Corianne Scally: in this case, and I think in many cases an external learning partner provides space for honest feedback

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Corianne Scally: and for promoting just in time strategy improvements while the process is still working itself out.

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Corianne Scally: coming in from the outside allowed people to talk to our team in confidence during the interviews that we conducted, and express any concerns as well as excitements that they had about the project’s progress, and we were able to thoughtfully aggregate the concerns in a way that did not call out individuals, but gave important feedback to the lead organization and help them strengthen their communication strategy mid Project.

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Corianne Scally: which really improved. I think the the sense of community around the project over time

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Corianne Scally: and finally, community building and change is possible even when not everyone agrees or is on board.

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Corianne Scally: The goal for this project from the beginning was to provide critical housing and services for a marginalized, for marginalized members of the community that the data showed needed this type of help.

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Corianne Scally: and to do so in a way that could draw the most community support and the least opposition.

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Corianne Scally: so moving forward with the project did not require all almost 50,000 residents of the city to agree with the exact plan.

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Corianne Scally: but responding to community concerns and listening to those as well as previous backlash against planned housing for homeless individuals and families, did lead to some important project adjustments such as building in a more commercial area rather than a strictly residential one. But this still met the project goals and yielded a successful community outcome.

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Corianne Scally: and with that I will turn things over to Amber.

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Amber Trout: Good people. I see your Q. And A. And so you got one more story to listen to. But Ken and Corianna tell you maybe click on that. There’s some detailed follow ups that I think will be good for conversation after this story.

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Kien Lee: Before you go amber, I think maybe Korea can answer this real quick, because there’s a question about where this project took place, and and the tiny homes.

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Amber Trout: That’s right.

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Corianne Scally: Yes, it was in Bozeman, Bozeman, Montana, and the homes were the, I should say. We finished our work in 2021, and the the 1st 12 units were completed and leased up. At that time.

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Kien Lee: Thank you back to you. Amber.

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Amber Trout: That’s right. So I’m bringing some community stories about community leaders. From North Dakota and South Dakota and the 23 native nations that share that same geography.

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Amber Trout: And this story talks about what’s a leader who’s a leader who gets to be a leader and really understanding the histories of the region of why, there’s 1 definition of a leader which was the hero that does it all. But we know that’s not true. And at the same time understanding that there’s a growing, the political climate where there’s widening disparities.

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Amber Trout: there’s growing frustrations. And, to be honest, it’s feeling like the forgotten region, hearing phrases like the flyover, or we’re only of interest when there’s an election. So the community is feeling misunderstood.

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Amber Trout: So how do you use a leadership development program across vast geographies. Well, that was the question of this of this leadership development program called Change Network. And how do you use a cohort model to connect people across towns and regions to build that sense of community when perhaps it feels like there’s a vastness, and you’re alone. When you want to see or make change in your community

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Amber Trout: and also really thinking about who is a leader, I’m a leader. So when I go to the next slide, it’s really assuming all of these leaders

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Amber Trout: didn’t come to this program to become leaders. They were already leaders. But what we know to be true and want to debunk is one person can’t do change.

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Amber Trout: And so

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Amber Trout: here is, how do you take people that feel isolated and give a chance to work with other people in different communities and towns

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Amber Trout: and tap into each other’s networks and build momentum there.

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Amber Trout: And what we learned is really, how do you use

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Amber Trout: the opportunity to connect, not to jump straight to systems.

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Amber Trout: And we know it’s not a straight through path. So on the next slide is really where I’m going to sit a lot. So how do you go from? I’m alone to the collective we.

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Amber Trout: and that really most of the key findings that I’m sharing today is in our report from developing this program. But you’ll see it’s an infinity sign on purpose. And when I’m talking about this program, I’m not just talking about the community leaders. I’m talking about the program implementers, the evaluators, and the funders. We were the outside group coming in

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Amber Trout: as the evaluators. And what we’ve learned to be true and learned from the communities. It takes a long time to be trusted in rural communities and vast geographies. So 1st we all had to learn how to work together. So I’m on that left hand side up here.

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Amber Trout: And how do you learn to be in space together? Who owns the data? What does evaluation mean? How has evaluation been used in different communities?

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Amber Trout: How is it used to be extracted?

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Amber Trout: So then, once we talk that through, and then you start building. How do we meaningfully engage in each other? So there’s the program that was providing opportunities for community leaders to learn how to identify with their own? How do they lead that one? You have a culture right? Some of the community leaders didn’t realize they had a culture, and it was an opportunity to be like, yes, I do. And then think about, how does that influence, how I interact with people?

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Amber Trout: And the one assumption here is people forgetting that everyone’s had access to professional development. That’s not true.

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Amber Trout: right? Especially when you’re talking about community change. You have fear you’re afraid of saying the wrong thing. What if it’s politically incorrect. And now I can’t go to the one church or the grocery store, because I’ve just othered myself in the community. So, having this cohort model also helps not only the evaluator say what is meaningful to you, but how do we engage with people that might seem similar or different to the perspectives and values that we hold.

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Amber Trout: So then that’s the insight. That’s why you see the light. But that’s not where it stops in this space is, how do you work together? How do you listen to each other? I might approach the solution way different than Corey, and then, Ken, but does that mean they’re wrong, and I close my ears. No right it means tell me a little bit more.

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Amber Trout: But what we learned is, it requires a deepened empathy, which is why, you see the unlocked heart, if I don’t feel seen, and you don’t feel seen, we don’t feel seen to see each other and be willing to take action. And so here we are really calling it a deepened empathy because you understood someone’s lived experience so much that you were willing to take a change.

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Amber Trout: Well, what does this mean with place?

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Amber Trout: Well, if this was the goal we had to think about, what’s the best way to use a pathway of change, which is the next slide to really think about.

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Amber Trout: What does change look like in place when it’s going to be incremental and small. And so we co-created this theory of change with the community leaders, with the program implementers and the funder. To really understand what does it take?

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Amber Trout: And the reason why we use imagery is because every story and everyone’s experience is going to be different. But the end is, how do you feel connected? So the 1st part with fertilization really is. Who am I? And how do I lead?

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Amber Trout: And then how do I practice through a project with others and get feedback?

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Amber Trout: So I’m budding, and I’m trying things out so much that I’m pollinizing. And now I’m reaching for a leader that has expertise. And here in the pollination we saw someone write a book, and then they were connected with a leader that was a librarian that did reading time. And so those are little changes that you could say so. What what does that mean? Well, you’re watching the ripple as you’re collecting these stories and watching the we. So then the proliferation goes like.

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Amber Trout: well, that went pretty good. What else needs to happen in the community? And here is where the deep and empathy comes into play. We saw in the leadership cohort model is what works for amber may not work for Corianne or for ken. So what works when I put a mural? Don’t just stop there. That’s an output. What’s the outcome? We’re hoping. And this is where we saw and learned from our rural experts saying.

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Amber Trout: an investment in rural place looks a lot different than an urban place and a mural means, community building and a place to come together and not to underestimate what that means. And it’s an opportunity, then, after the proliferation of projects to have deep rooted, so these leaders can reach for each other and not feel alone. Some felt that they were the only person that was looking for opportunities. So everyone in the community could get good food, read the books that they want, or

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Amber Trout: have access to health care, and so, knowing that there’s other peoples in this vast geography that you’ve met with, you’ve learned with, you’ve learned about their cultures right there. A phone call away a text away really helped create this rooted system. And the reason why there’s a bridge is we’re at the end. This has been in. I don’t know 6 or 7 years. Where? How do you bridge people that may not have been in the cohort program?

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Amber Trout: But there’s a tipping point in all these communities of a lot of change navigators that are saying, Hey, we can do something. And so you have this theory of change collecting data following the ripple. So what does that look like? Let me show you? On the next slide.

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Amber Trout: We realized we had to get out of the way of the evaluators. How was data collection, the community leaders interviewing themselves over time and so that we would start at the beginning and the end of a program

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Amber Trout: it was. It was about a year, and then there was always an alumni events, and then you had a chance to see everyone.

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Amber Trout: And what here is ripple mapping. A lot of you mentioned. How do you document the small changes? How do I say they matter? Well, we had that same struggle the 1st couple years, and this is what really helped us is. When the leaders interviewed each other, they saw each other’s own leaderships. They felt valued, and then started connecting the dots. How they could work together, not only changing, how we interact with people made for more robust conversation. We were able to, you know, advocate, for you know.

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Amber Trout: some a couple people started a business together, or realized what different resources.

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Amber Trout: So every year we added the ripple further and further. So when we went to communicate back to the Funder, or if someone wanted to communicate to their local newspaper or their communities, they’re able to say, Here’s the change. We’re able to do

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Amber Trout: so. This was not only a leadership development program that focused on the interpersonal, it was connected to the place system the whole time.

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Amber Trout: but it was making sure that it was an evaluation that made sense to the context. And because of the vast geographies, how could people see their stories? And how are they the data collection and storytellers that they could then feel confident. We even have folks run for

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Amber Trout: education positions, state position so. And and it links to these critical conversations. So the takeaway here is really, how do you help people see the change? Because when you’re in the middle of a change, you don’t understand. You may not see how significant it is to you and others to keep moving forward. And so that’s what we wanted to share with. How does leadership connect, to place, connect to community building and sense of belonging.

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Kien Lee: Thanks, amber So

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Kien Lee: between Amber Corey and myself, I mean, our stories have really lifted up certain things about a place that needs close attention, and they include history. What is history

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Kien Lee: that we really think about? What a history of a place are those significant past events that shape the political, economic, and cultural conditions of a place. And what we have to remember about history, a lesson that we learned from an evaluation we did is that that impact of those past events, and that those past events can be

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Kien Lee: I don’t know. 3 months ago it can be a whole generation ago. But these, these past events can be felt right. The impact can be felt by generations of families and newcomers even today, and sometimes they’re felt implicitly, or sometimes they’re felt very brashly, and it can be very disruptive to the daily lives of the people.

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Kien Lee: Narratives we all talked about, narratives and narratives must be shifted, and one of the things we learn here is that local media plays a critical role. So you know, when we talk about how. And I think there’s a question about how do you shift narratives? It’s hard. It doesn’t happen overnight. I remember attending a workshop, and the speakers talk about how it takes years and years, sometimes to even change narratives.

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Kien Lee: And you you have to figure out like, how do you start with those influences in the community? Where is that influential voice that can help shift that narrative.

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Kien Lee: Voices of different groups of people in the place must be engaged and listened to. I don’t think this is a surprise to anybody, but it’s always easier said than done. Sometimes these different groups of people have conflicting perceptions and experiences. So how do you create space to hear from these folks as a group and then together sometimes. But if you’re going to bring them together.

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Kien Lee: one of the capacities that’s essential is the ability to manage and transform that conflict, because otherwise the experience of the bad experience of coming together will only make it will make people not want to come to the table ever again. And so that’s a very critical capacity to have

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Kien Lee: funders must be self-aware also of how they’re perceived in different places. In some places they’re very welcome. In some places the history of their funding maybe, have had bad left people with a bad experience. And so, even if the Funder came in and changed the initiative name, or it’s a different set of staff that experience can still be in that community, and therefore the perception can be negative or positive.

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Kien Lee: Factors associated with economic changes must be thoroughly examined. I mean these economic changes. People often look for a scapegoat.

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Kien Lee: and unfortunately, newcomers to a place are often seen as the reason for why the economic changed, the economic went bad or went sour. And so again, understanding that and being prepared for that is really important. Geography determines division, collaboration, reach, and investment.

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Kien Lee: If a community, a place is really spas and very wide. Sometimes it can take people hours to drive from one side of the place to the other side of the place. How do you make sure that’s built into the strategy? The time that’s needed. Or sometimes there are physical divides, like in my story, where there’s a physical divide that is so literal like, how do you actually help people understand that

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Kien Lee: that divide which is coincides with the have and have nots, and where they live need to be

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Kien Lee: shifted and thought differently. I think Corian story really pointed out to political and policy, landscape must be assessed and monitored as people make decisions based on their political affiliations of the time, or what’s needed and and leadership. You know, leadership plays an important role in being able to shift some of these policies.

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Kien Lee: Next slide, please.

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Kien Lee: With regards to evaluation, I mean, there are so many ways to evaluate place-based Change Cross Case study is one of them. But some of the things that we’ve really learned over the years is that the conditions of a place should be monitored and they can be monitored for 2 reasons. One is you want to change the conditions. So their outcomes

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Kien Lee: at the same time the contextual variables that affected the outcomes. And so it’s really important to tease that out and to understand. When is it an outcome. When is it that something that affected the outcome? And it’s not clean? So it’s not always. It’s not something that you can say A led to B, but it’s really looking at contributions.

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Kien Lee: And what led to the outcome, and how the outcome also affected the context. Commute capacity to affect change can be assessed and monitored in quick and simple ways like I mentioned, I think there’s a question that I’m going to answer quickly in the chat that talked about what are successful methods used for collecting inputs for commute capacity. One of the things we did was we had organizations in a place identified. Who are those key organizations in a place that play a real role

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Kien Lee: in changing the conditions of the place. And then you contact the organizations and you have the organizations complete the assessment. Ideally, the assessment is not completed by one person from the organization, by.

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Kien Lee: but by a group of people in your organization that perhaps sit at different places in your organization from people who are actually working in the community front lines to people who are making decisions, because then they actually come together and have to come to some consensus about what they think. Their capacity is to perform that one function right? And then you get that information back.

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Kien Lee: And then you can aggregate that. So that’s how we’ve done it in the past sense of community and connections, within groups of people and among groups of people in a place are also useful measures. The sense of community index is one measure. There are definitely other measures out there to assess connections, but it’s important to not only think about that strength of that sense of community within a group of people.

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Kien Lee: but between 2 groups of people that may have to interact with each other in common places, but otherwise may not actually see each other as allies, right? And so again.

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Kien Lee: measuring that sense of community within and between is really helpful. Conflicts and setbacks are not necessarily negative outcomes or failures. And I think this is something really important to remember. Again, conflict transformation is a really key capacity in place-based change. It’s not a capacity that we see often. It’s also a capacity. We see that because it’s not there, it sometimes creates. It causes the work to slow down right.

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Kien Lee: and then setbacks are not necessarily bad things. I think funders like to measure things like, did a policy change, or did it not change? And I remember a story where a Funder said, well, we failed because that policy never didn’t get passed.

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Kien Lee: But what happened was a whole network of relationships were established. They were mobilized to push for that policy, and those relationships will stay, and they can be mobilized again for the next challenge. And so just think about how we frame these conflicts and setbacks. Sometimes

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Kien Lee: I think with that we’re at the end.

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Kien Lee: I’m going to ask Amber and and Corinne, just if you have anything you want to add to what I said.

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Amber Trout: I was gonna bridge. Because there’s a good question saying, what’s the difference? Like you were? We’ve mentioned power and community building and community organizing. So what’s how do you approach program evaluation? That’s different than community organizing in the context of maybe

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Amber Trout: traditional program development, like in government and use university programs. I think there’s like, How do you be? An agent of change in different contexts is maybe how I hear that. So I just wanted to lift that up since you’re kind of jamming on the on those findings.

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Kien Lee: Yeah.

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Kien Lee: Do you want me to answer that.

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Amber Trout: I think you yeah, your Corey. And I think it’s it was directly related after you presented your story, Ken, that one came up, and there’s another one about the the ripple effects. And while you’re thinking, I don’t mind sharing like some of the questions that we asked folks is, you know what were some of the experiences and changes that happened during during your during the program experience and kept it really like.

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Amber Trout: how was it interacting with your friends? Did it feel different, or people interacting different with you? Are you being invited to different spaces or new connections, and then asking, like what was unexpected, right? And then, really, with the failure and conflict, what’s good is is acknowledging that and say, how would you do things differently? Or what was the unexpected that really opened doors because it wasn’t the way maybe you thought.

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Amber Trout: And then the most important piece was. Then, after they interviewed each other at the table what was similar and different across your journeys, trying to change

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Amber Trout: different points of access or awareness on a topic in your community, and then see if there’s any Aha’s or build upon each other. So it’s not only data collection, and it’s the thing we’ve been hearing, it’s community building and using evaluation as a form of building community. To see the change you’re already doing is another continuous, I think Orian was calling it that that just in time feedback. And so how do you put that in as you go? So that there was a question on that. So I just wanted to.

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Kien Lee: To answer that question.

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Kien Lee: Thanks, Amber, and I’ll come back to the question about how is evaluating the community organizing context different. But before I do that, I guess, Corey. And do you want to do you have anything? I see you’re busy typing answers as well to questions.

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Corianne Scally: No, I mean the only thing that jumped into my mind while you were kind of summarizing the takeaways. Kian was just how important that the idea of like building towards something is that that just that progress is an outcome. Any kind of progress is an outcome, and it relates to other work I’ve done on on place based investments and finding, like

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Corianne Scally: lo and behold, place-based investments that build on top of each other can actually amplify change over time as opposed to thinking of it in a negative light. Why does a place continue to need

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Corianne Scally: targeted investment? But instead, actually seeing that as an indicator of strength and progress that one investment was able to help a community, you know, advance a few steps and really lay groundwork for more progress and advancement. So I appreciate you saying that that resonates.

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Kien Lee: Thank you.

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Kien Lee: so to answer that question about how is, you know, evaluating place? You know the community organizing as a major feature. How is that different? I think. What we found is that it’s the it’s the evaluating, understanding, the how, and not necessarily the what and so in the kind of in this one place based change work that we evaluated. I mean, we had to look at the relationships

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Kien Lee: and who had connections to whom and who had the power, who were the decision makers in this place. And what you want to see over time is a shift right from the power being held by a family. Sometimes when you’re in a rural town, or to elected officials only, and it’s how do you shift that to the community? How do you shift that to community leaders who can then

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Kien Lee: speak for their speak for their community members and be able to drive change that actually speaks directly to the needs of the community members. A colleague of ours. David Chavez often says this about evaluating kind of community organizing, workplace-based change or power building work is about, you know, at the end who gets what they want.

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Kien Lee: and that’s what we want to see. We want to see that you know the people who have no access to resources and opportunities at the end of a strategy get what they want

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Kien Lee: so that they can thrive and live to their full potential. And so really, it’s about assessing those relationships, those connections

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Kien Lee: where decision makes, how are decisions made? And at the end of the day, what changes I was just thinking about Corian’s story. And then the story I told like the story A was like in the beginning of a strategy, people coming together, identifying common concerns, just getting to know one another, not seeing each other as enemies, and shifting the narratives about each other.

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Kien Lee: and then over the years. And Coriana. It took 5 years for that story to unfold in her situation over time. As you develop the voice to advocate for change together, you build on it, and that success of feeling, like our collective action, despite our perceived differences, can actually lead to change that benefits all of us

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Kien Lee: right? And so then you can. 5 years later you get the tiny homes. You get a policy change that allows for that. So I think it’s sort of how do you track that story over time. And how do you? How do you monitor the shifts over time from relationship changes to narrative changes to actual policy, changes that benefit everybody. And it’s really about connecting those dots.

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Amber Trout: A lot of energy around the community organizing. I think you started saying about the time difference, and also folks saying like, you know. Sometimes funders don’t pay for evaluation. So how do you overcome this gap that maybe you need to tell your story? I’m guessing is

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Amber Trout: in the tea leaves of that comment.

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Amber Trout: I was quickly reading the 3rd one. I couldn’t read it fast enough and say at the same time, but those were a couple that were out there.

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Amber Trout: I don’t know.

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Kien Lee: I mean, they don’t fund evaluation, but they fund learning. I think

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Kien Lee: I know the 2 of you probably have seen that too.

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Amber Trout: I’ve seen it. Corian. Tell me what you think is the I’ve seen like, how do we learn, or how in how do we do real time strategy adjustments which

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Amber Trout: for us, community science, you know, strategy and evaluation are at the same starting line. So I think that could be another way to like strategy, refinement, or continuous learning. I say the other thing, Coriana, curious. What you have to say is, I’ve heard learning agendas right, and then, when folks ask for a learning agenda again, that’s another way to get data to tell the stories that you’ve heard.

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Corianne Scally: Yeah, I think. You know, most funders are interested in in proving that their investments matter and so their their evaluation is one important way to you know, to get to that story. But yeah, just to really reiterate what Ken and Amber have already said about other ways of of partnering with funders to

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Corianne Scally: to show them the benefit of understanding their goals, developing a measurement framework, to capture progress over time and circling back regularly to to track progress.

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Corianne Scally: You know, we might call that evaluation in in some context. And then in other contexts, yeah, it’s it’s really a learning process

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Corianne Scally: and giving them the ability to to tell the stories of what their investments have have helped. Communities achieve.

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Kien Lee: Thank you. I would agree. And

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Kien Lee: I think time’s up because it was 45 min, and I want to respect everybody’s time. I know there are 2 questions still open in the in the Q&A chat, but we we will definitely do our best to answer these questions separately, and we will be sending out a post Webinar package with our information on it, our emails and stuff. And so if you all have any questions or any additional information you want. Please feel free to write any of us.

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Kien Lee: Thank you so much for listening in the afternoon, Monday afternoon, or morning, or evening, wherever you are. We really appreciate your time and have a wonderful day.