How Funders Build the Successful Conditions for a PAR Evaluation

  1. Determine that the evaluators have adequate facilitation skills to identify and engage all relevant stakeholders, as well as to help participants learn. If this is not the case, be certain that appropriate and effective facilitators are present on the team.
  2. Set clear goals, objectives, and milestones with evaluators in advance and schedule regular check-ins on progress.
  3. Be proactive about anticipating that plans will likely change as the evaluation unfolds. Ask about changes, and be ready to help modify milestones and redefine outcomes.
  4. With sensitivity to your role as the funder and taking care not to overstep the appropriate boundaries, prepare to be a problem-solving partner, assisting individuals, organizations, and the team to find solutions and build capacity as problems are inevitably encountered. At the same time, realize that it might sometimes be important not to understep out of deference to the group process. As one of the stakeholders, funders have an obligation to the group to articulate their true interests and needs.

Takeaways are critical, bite-sized resources either excerpted from our guides or written by Candid Learning for Funders using the guide's research data or themes post-publication. Attribution is given if the takeaway is a quotation.

This takeaway was derived from Participatory Action Research.

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