General Session: Nothing For Us, Without Us: Getting Started with Community Engagement and Culturally Responsive Evaluation
Public libraries serve increasingly diverse stakeholders, each with unique interests, needs and strengths. Using the tools from community engagement and culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE), you can help create a welcoming space where community members see their culture, values and lived experiences reflected in the library programing and collections; and an environment where they are excited to contribute to transparent and collaborative program evaluations.
In this session, I will introduce the field of CREE (its origins, its main principles, and its common applications). After that brief introduction, participants will explore the different kinds of community engagement, and when to employ each method.
After this orientation, we will roll up our sleeves and get to the real work! First, we will practice creating an interactive and culturally responsive evaluation activity that can be used at the end of meetings or events. Guided by some of the self-assessment tools for culturally responsive evaluation and community engagement, we will also create some sample scripts that will help us navigate challenging discussions about evaluation results with our teams, stakeholders, and community partners.
Participants will leave this session ready to begin integrating CREE into their program planning and to start to lead conversations about community engagement.