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

    Ubuntu Evaluations

    Zulu pronunciation: [ùɓúntʼù] noun

    The Ubuntu Evaluations project is a direct response to formal and informal community feedback captured in several processes and events: the Victorian African Communities Action Plan; a recent Deakin University public policy forum: “Challenges Facing South Sudanese and Horn of Africa Youth in Melbourne” and many other community discussions advocating African leadership in the design and delivery of programs for their communities.

    The project, which builds on work led by Professor Bagale Chilisa and colleagues, seeks to promote high-quality evaluation, underpinned by theory and practice that is relevant and responsive to the needs of Africans in Victoria. The goal is to enable an evaluation and program design process that is led by Africans in Victoria for Africans in Victoria.

    The premise for this approach is that evaluation practice which is not based on the multiple African values and African worldviews that exist, lacks insight into the cultural and contextual factors influencing African settlement in Victoria.

    There is a need to foster and develop the intellectual leadership and capacity (Chilisa, 2015) within the African community in Victoria, to ensure that it plays a leading role in guiding mixed methods program evaluations that reach broader policy and service delivery stakeholders.

    Building on existing programs offering leadership training that have an internal governance focus, the Ubuntu project addresses two significant challenges facing Africans in Victoria in their ability to contribute to public policy processes that affect them.

    Firstly, it will address deficiencies in currently available data concerning African communities through an emphasis on training portfolio co-leaders (who are bilingual African researchers and evaluators) to work with leading scholars and subject matter experts from Universities in participatory methods of data gathering. Second, by providing appropriate skills training and tools, it will build leadership skills beyond internal organisational governance and into the external policymaking arena. Building capacity to this level will enable African Victorians to engage in a more meaningful and formal way with policymakers in all spheres.

    In this way, African Victorians will not only be able to engage effectively in designing services most suited to the needs of their communities, but they will also be able to hold service providers to account in service delivery.

    We will deliver this outcome not only through provision of training, but by interfacing top down population level metrics and evidence, with bottom-up participatory data and practice-based knowledge and systematically synthesise the evidence using collaborative sensemaking approaches that:

    • Enable evaluative conclusions to be drawn about the performance, value and impact of an intervention or service
    • Enhance the quality and credibility of research findings
    • Produce high-quality work by generating deeper, broader and more inclusive understanding of the complexity surrounding African-Victorians at both local and state-wide level
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