With, not to

Third of my five from the State of Evaluation report, and the one closest to how I work. The people who can solve a problem are usually already in the room. The people of the place have the answers for a place, we just need to get to their articulation. I have built my placemaking and facilitation practice on that belief, and it applies just as much to evaluation.

The report argues that evaluative thinking needs to be embedded early, long before a report lands on anyone's desk. In place and community work I would put it more bluntly. Evaluation is too often done to communities rather than with them. People are surveyed and their experience mined, they rarely shape the questions, and they almost never see what was found.

None of this is news. We know it, we have known it for years, and most of us can recite the critique in our sleep. Which is the uncomfortable part. The principle is settled and the practice has barely moved, because doing it differently asks more of everyone, earlier, when budgets and timelines are least forgiving. Knowing better has not been enough.

What does move it is timing. Bringing evaluation in at the devising stage, rather than bolting it on at the end, opens a genuine opportunity for co-design. It lets us decide together what would count as this work going well, in the language the community itself uses, before anything is measured. The early start is what makes the shared part possible.

Framed that way, evaluation stops being extraction and starts being shared sense-making. It also, not coincidentally, tends to be the kind that actually gets used.

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