The Nuts and Bolts of our new Action Research Project
Our latest Action Research Project is part of our constantly evolving journey as a research organisation to ensure that our community development practice is ‘right way’, and that community long term dreams are being effectively supported by the work we do alongside communities.
We kicked off the research in September 2021, connecting with interested community research partners and we are delighted to share it with you now!
This research project design is crucial to a better understanding of the M&E frameworks we have developed. It has great potential to improve and adapt our M&E approaches that assist in measuring how effective our approaches are with First Nation communities.
There is a degree of confidence among our team that M&E approaches to measure the effectiveness of standalone projects are working well. As part of this research, we are focusing on how effective our M&E of community long-term dreams (aspirations) are. Often this involves looking at the impact of multiple projects over time. At the dream level, the approach is very similar to the project level, but with a focus on long term outcomes. We are hoping that the yarning within the action research project will guide our M&E design on changes in relation to long-term dream outcomes. The goal is to see how effective our approach is to measuring long term outcomes, and better understand our contribution to the communities dream.
Our framework of evaluation includes monitoring and evaluating change for each project, and also takes into account monitoring and evaluating changes in the bigger picture relating to the community’s dream.
Ideally, our evaluation is built into our Story of Change model (see ‘Time to think critically – community centred design’ for more on our Story of Change), which helps us identify what is needed in both project design. As part of the action research we will be implementing changes, reflecting on our findings, determining what improvements can be made within our data collection and project development with communities and implementing changes to our practice. The action research project also aims to increase our awareness as an organisation; to facilitate learning and sharing of experiences, promoting innovation in approaches and methods used in First Nations’ evaluation, and as part of the final part of the research, discuss and publish information regarding our lessons learned and some of our fail forwards!
Why are we doing research about monitoring and evaluation?
As a First Nations’ led organisation, we are guided by the culture that is embedded within the community settings, along with the distinctive legal and political rights that First Nations’ people have. These are the guiding foundations to our community practice and research. However, we are also mindful of the impacts of colonisation from the past and the impact that has on us today, so, it is paramount that we intentionally privilege First Nations’ voices and ways of being within our community practice, in our publications, community projects, policy position papers, leadership planning discussions, and M&E. This is an important step forward towards self-determination.
We have the belief that research can—and does—enable the creation of spaces that promote First Nations’ self-determination and strong Country. While this research does have an evaluation agenda, the primary aim is to foster an understanding and use of different evaluation approaches and methods to ensure that in community practice and evaluations are culturally responsive and inclusive to the communities we work alongside with. This is done through the recognition of different First Nation worldviews and valuing the strengths of First Nations’ evaluation practices.
The Dream – how can we improve our systems and practice and elevate First Nations’ community voices?
In this research project, we want to focus on the dream level so we can capture the big picture. This is crucial to informing our practice and to for the project to be meaningful to the communities we work alongside. This will involve lengthy discussions with our community development team and the communities through yarning and deep listening. Our approach also needs to be highly responsive to the community and be reflexive to First Nations’ local cultural contexts. The intention is for the findings to advance First Nations’ paradigms, methodologies, capacity building, and research on M&E.
Paradigm Changes
As the action research continues, we will continue to value cultural protocols and norms and acknowledge that First Nations’ people have the right to be First Nations’ people. It is important that the research plays a part in placing the power back into First Nations’ communities and highlights the depth, complexity and richness of the First Nations’ communities we partner with.
“Nothing about us, without us”
We will continue to share with you the latest on the action research project and our M&E journey in future blogs — stay tuned!
This blog is the third in a three part series on M&E. In this blog we discussed the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of our latest Action Research Project. You can read the other blogs here: