W.K. Kellogg Foundation New Tools New Visions2 Project: Utilizing Participatory Evaluation Methods to Inform Best Practices among Community-academic Partnerships

In 2008, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded four African American communities in Georgia as part of a three year project entitled New Tools, New Visions 2. The intent of the project is to build community capacities to: a) improve health and eliminate health disparities, b) enhance and/or create community-academic partnerships between local communities and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and c) develop community-based participatory research (CBPR) projects to address local conditions that have led to and continue to perpetuate health disparities. The external evaluation, being conducted by the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University, utilizes participatory methods to assist the partnerships with telling their stories, evaluate their partnership's efforts, and build evaluation capacity. With its roots in empowerment education, participatory evaluation aligns with CBPR approaches as a way of engaging community members in the evaluation process in order to provide the insider's point of view. The purpose of this presentation is to 1) provide an overview of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's New Tools New Visions 2 project, 2) describe the participatory evaluation methods that are being utilized across multiple sites, and 3) highlight lessons learned about building trust and evaluation capacity, while developing and maintaining consistent protocols in order to inform best practices for the development of community-academic partnerships, specifically among communities aligned with HBCUs.