Beyond Community Participation: Shifting Ownership Across the Evaluation Lifecycle
Oct 29, 2026 • 9:30 am – 11:00 am
Adaptive Leadership, Equity & Inclusion • Free Event, Virtual Event
When an evaluation is labeled "participatory," who actually owns the design, the data, and the final story?
Too often, community involvement is flattened into extractive data collection or late-stage consultation. In this session, Bhargavi Thakur draws on real-world project experience to explore what it takes to move beyond surface-level participation toward communities as co-owners across design, implementation, and reporting.
More specifically, we will dive into two core strands:
- Moving from consultation to co-ownership: Practical pathways for involving communities from the outset as co-designers, data gatherers, and co-authors of stories and reports.
- Navigating unresolved tensions: Honest inquiry into the structural friction, institutional constraints, and residual power dynamics that persist even within highly progressive, community-centered evaluation.
You'll walk away with concrete entry points for shifting community roles across the project lifecycle, language and tactics for navigating donor constraints and institutional resistance, and peer exchange on handling power imbalances in practice
No cost associated.