Services

Moving validity to a multicultural beat

No one single point-of-view is the complete truth. But together, they comprise a more complete truth. As a service provider at the cutting edge of culturally responsive evaluation, participatory developmental, empowerment and realist approaches, we equip our clients with the knowledge and skills to deliver multiculturally valid evaluations.

We support you to deliver evaluations that presume an understanding of culture and culturally biased discrimination and build capacity in culturally anchored methodology.

We offer this service to support our clients to understand and appreciate diverse cultural perspectives and enable inclusive evaluative understandings and judgements that are culturally contextualised.

Evaluation Workshops Projects

    • Evaluation: making sense of multicultural knowledge, merit and worth

    We deliver end-to-end, multidisciplinary, culturally responsive evaluations that interface the community voice with translational researchers, subject matter experts, program and policy designers and service providers.

    Our evaluations draw from the successful innovations in mixed-methods social inquiry and participatory approaches. We combine population level metrics and scientific evidence with diverse local level cultural perspectives to produce results that:

    • enhance the validity and credibility of our findings
    • generate deeper, broader, more inclusive understanding of complexity
    • engage multiple, often discordant, perspectives and worldviews
    • illuminate political and value dimensions of work to advance understanding

    By bringing a multicultural lens to complex social phenomena, we move towards new ways of seeing, interpreting and knowing. We expose and interrupt biases and assumptions that threaten validity in evaluation theory, program theory and validity theory.

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    Workshops: building methods toward applying multicultural evaluation, facilitation, consultation and engagement

    We will be offering online and face to face workshops in participatory evaluation, mixed methods social inquiry, culturally responsive evaluation and social policy development, led by some of the best in the business.

    Some of our face-to-face workshops will take you out of your offices and into community where you will work on real projects to build your skills in culturally responsive evaluation. These workshops also aim to support multicultural community groups to design projects and build their skills in monitoring and evaluation, in the spirit of reciprocity.

    In addition, we offer increasingly popular internal evaluator capacity-building workshops. This approach has the following advantages:

    • internal evaluators are familiar with the organisation’s culture, aims and objectives
    • internal staff tend to be more willing to speak to insiders than to outsiders
    • findings and criticisms from internal evaluators are more easily accepted
    • internal evaluation usually costs less than an external evaluator. 

    As external evaluators, we offer services that compliment work led by evaluation consultants working in mainstream policy and program development and delivery. This approach has the following advantages:

    • external evaluations are more objective, bringing distance from the work
    • external evaluators have a wide range of evaluation skills and experience
    • internal staff may be more willing to speak to outsiders than to insiders
    • external evaluators provide greater credibility to findings, particularly positive ones.

    Whichever way the market moves, we can build your organisation’s ability to produce more culturally responsive evaluations.

    Register your interest

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    Projects

    inTouch multicultural centre against family violence: “Strengthening workforce capacity to better prevent and respond to family violence in migrant and refugee communities” project

    We were approached by inTouch multicultural centre against family violence to identify gaps and opportunities for workforce capacity building across the Victorian family violence service system to produce a theory driven Investment Logic Map.

    The evaluation adopted a culturally responsive approach and drew from principles-based practices in family violence prevention and program design. Using critical race, postcolonial, feminist theories and ecological systems thinking, we recommended actions that address structural and institutional asymmetries underlying unequal access to protective factors and unequal exposure to risk factors. 

    Critical race, postcolonial, and feminist theories remind us that the current distribution of access are the cumulative effects of historical and ongoing patterns of inequity and limited understanding by:

    • Policy developers of the lived experiences of multicultural victims and survivors of family violence and 
    • The family violence workforce to design and deliver responses that meet the needs of migrants and are refugees who are victims of family violence. 

    Examples of recommendations we made:

    • Partner with culturally competent training providers to uplift sector-wide capability in migrant & refugee specific service delivery Partner and engage in efforts that build the migrant/ refugee workforce—closing ethnic and gender-based gaps and power differentials in employment, income, and influence, which increase the likelihood of exploitation and abuse.
    • Formally establish, manage and deliver best practice culturally responsive training through a range of training delivery modes.
    • Maintain active partnerships with multicultural communities to influence and inform their family violence service design and delivery and
    • Increase State Government understanding and prioritisation of multicultural communities in law and policy reform that change political, social, and cultural narratives around power and control over service delivery decisions—including by modelling shared power through long-term partnership and the symmetric, reciprocal exchange, as opposed to the asymmetric extraction or deposit, of knowledge, staff, and other resources.


    “Our Voices: Stances for Multicultural Australia” Questionnaire Report

    The Centre administered a survey in early 2021, which is being analysed. We invited people and organisations whose clients include members of multicultural communities to complete a questionnaire and were particularly interested in feedback from a broad group of stakeholders ranging from evaluators, managers, researchers and policy advocates, procurement and project officers, program designers, and interpreters and we succeeded.
    The questionnaire was designed to fill a gap in reports on multicultural issues in Australia, two of which are:

    • The Victorian Government Report in Multicultural Affairs, which outlines policies, strategies and services of Victorian Government departments and reports on some key indicators and
    • The Scanlon Report: Taking Australia’s temperature on migration issues.  

    At CMPE we believe there is a need for additional information about how departments and others respond to the many and varied needs of multicultural communities in Victoria and Australia.

    The purpose of the questionnaire was to explore how:

    • organisations and individuals hear and respond to the voices of multicultural communities in Australia 
    • such voices are used to make policies and deliver services and
    • deliver multicultural evaluations that respond to need

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