Continuing the Journey to Early and Enough: Partnering with Consumers in Research
George Gabel: In 2020, the Kempe Center, University of Colorado, through its Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare (October 2020) offered an opportunity for me to reengage with the work of reimagining child welfare. Was clear that many advocates and community leaders with experience and passion were making the changes locally and nationally, not evident that evaluation and research had fully taken its seat at the table. Through conversation with leaders at Children’s Trust Fund Alliance, I was introduced to two champions already working on the change to make current child welfare services more community-based and focused on well-being of families. Joining with lived experience experts, Tanya Long and Timothy Phipps, we began a series of conversations to plan a session to talk about what must happen in evaluation and research to support change. We convened a session: Early and Enough: Partnering with Consumers in Evaluation (Gabel, Phipps, and Long). The handout for this session is available here for download.
What follows grew out of that planning and the Kempe conference. I am grateful to both champions for supporting me, as I moved to the next chapter in my life and career. The words below came from that conversation. In our first conversation, Tanya said, why are we still talking about this, folks have been doing this the right way for 10 years? Yes, some have, but many have not gotten there yet. Haven’t many of the studies I worked on just used persons with lived experience as subjects, as sources of information, not co-creation and not ongoing collaboration to best learn and use the information collected. And the translation process, getting the lessons learned back to the field and community is stilted. There is often more loyalty to the funder (client), than to the community and field. Often, there is so much worry about proprietary value of the information, it waits, instead of going quickly to dialogue and informing the community and field.
Note: We used the terms consumer and client during these conversations, I know words matter- and I currently use the term “lived experience experts” to include child welfare clients, as well as any person impacted by the child welfare system. I expect there will be more conversation on terminology as child welfare systems unlearn, rewire, and replace!
The charge of G Cubed Impact Consulting is narrow. The work will center on brief assessments of an agency, organization, Tribe, or jurisdictions success in partnering with persons with lived experience in their research, including evaluation /or and collection of service data. Working in partnership with local lived experience experts, G Cubed Impact will document good practices, challenges, and gaps in the implementation of codesign, with examples from literature and lessons learned from others in the field. The produced guidance will inform the staff or community, as they move forward with strategic plans for their work.
Conversation by Tanya Long, Timothy Phipps, and George Gabel
As in most of the work done in not-for-profit and public agencies, the client is what drives the body of work performed. Clients are the reason for the programs, the initiatives, the white papers, the conferences, and of course, the research.
So why is it when there is a need for an evaluation, the client is left out of the process until the final step when they may be asked to review the finished product? That is, if it is from a more progressive or forward-thinking non-profit organization who partner with the clients that they serve from time to time.
The last statement was not meant to be facetious, in fact, it was meant as a full-on inquiry about the misuse and misrepresentation of the very people the process is geared to serve! I say misuse in that in an evaluation, the answers will come in the process on the behalf of the client and the successes/disappointments are always measured in the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the clients’ outcome. I would like to propose that the client should be the one who sums up the successes or progress at each juncture to take the “temperature” of the process, thus driving how the evaluation will be conducted. Marketing strategies have it right when they send out customer satisfaction surveys at the end of a service. Why? Because they know that the old axiom that the “customer is always right” is what drives the improvements and future increase in sales of their products. Businesses want to ensure that every step is satisfactory to the customer so they can continue, tweak, or discard a step in the process in serving their customers. Therefore, it makes sense to involve the client in the evaluation at the very beginning and is a step in the right direction and the start of the proper way to utilize the most valuable asset of a service agency, the client.
Clients have real and focused clarity on how a program is working/not working and many are not afraid to say so. Clients will explain if they feel that the program failed and how it may be improved upon or even disposed of if it simply will not work. Clients can better define the outcomes of the evaluation; the “what works” questions about the evaluation should include the client perspective, not just the agency perspective. For example, just learning about rate of reunification in a foster care program is not enough clients can infuse the right questions in the evaluation about client well-being.
Clients have experience with some of the survey questions that may be asked, thus saving valuable time that a respondent may be appreciative of when completing a survey on top of their already hectic and Zoom filled days. Clients can shorten the answers, tweak it to be more succinct and inform the researcher if an answer is too technical or using outdated or academic terminology. Also, a client may have lived experience that may answer the questions from a different perspective, prompting more or fewer questions for a survey.
George Gabel: This is just the first of blogs on building partnership with lived experience experts in child welfare research, evaluation, and data reporting. There is a lot of great work happening. I welcome suggestions for blogs about projects, organizations, and programs that are doing it right. Please co-author with me! I look forward to collaboration with those whose passion is transforming the child welfare system into networks of community well-being.