Leslie K. Goodyear, City Year

Young people's participation in all aspects of community research and evaluation, from conceptualization to action, benefits youth and communities: youth acquire new skills, become active participants in their communities, and gain a new sense of social responsibility through involvement. They serve as role models for younger children and as experts with local knowledge about issues that affect youth. Young people bring their energy and interests to community issues, offering new perspectives on pressing issues and a conduit for community change. Youth-engaged community research and evaluation offers an opportunity to build on prior learning, informing not just the specific youth-serving programs and communities that commission this evaluation approach, but also the fields of evaluation, community research, and youth development.

Youth-engaged community research and evaluation is not an idea that has appeared out of nowhere; it draws on many research and evaluation traditions. Implicit in the implementation of a community evaluation project that engages young people are the tenets of youth development, Participatory Action Research, empowerment evaluation, youth organizing, and community development. All of these traditions rely on "local knowledge" and prioritize the involvement of "non-experts" in evaluation and research, challenging notions of a value-free social science and evaluation.

Successful youth-engaged research and evaluation projects require youth participation as equal partners in evaluation and research processes, in order to encourage youth empowerment. These projects also promote a culture of rigorous research. Not only can youth learn through action what constitutes rigorous research and evaluation, they also can contribute to the validity of evaluation processes by adding their perspectives and voices to all phases of the evaluation, from design to data collection to analysis and reporting. [1]

Beyond program improvement, youth development, and community change, the process of involving youth in evaluation and research can offer an opportunity for new thinking to influence the fields of evaluation and research. Beyond offering benefits for youth, adult partners, youth-serving programs, and the communities in which they live, engaging youth as active partners in evaluation and research opens the door to new possibilities for the role of evaluation in society. When we challenge and change the ways we do evaluation, we offer the opportunity for people to think in new ways about evaluation.

There are many reasons to engage youth in evaluation and research projects. Youth-engaged research and evaluation offers the opportunity to demonstrate the power of democratic, dialogic evaluation practice. Engaging young people in all aspects of community research and evaluation projects offers those of us who promote the democratizing of evaluation and research endeavors the chance to influence the next generation of evaluation and research theorists, practitioners, and, most importantly, consumers of evaluation and research. (After all, we can't expect all of the young people with whom we work to aspire to be community researchers or evaluators!)

Adults and youth can influence communities not just by participating together in the evaluation or research process, gathering data, and generating findings. They also can use this process to enhance understanding on multiple levels, educating the community about:

Beyond participation in the data collection and analysis phases of research and evaluation, youth can participate in a process of creatively presenting findings to various invested stakeholders and implementing those findings in practice. These presentations can promote, demonstrate, and role model the democratic dialogue created by the involvement of youth in the evaluation process. Involving young people in this process promotes an ongoing intergenerational conversation that, beyond the specific formative and summative findings generated by the evaluation, brings important public issues for dialogue and debate to the surface„for example, the role of youth in forming policy at both the programmatic and community levels and the effect of research and evaluation on solving social and community problems. Engaging in evaluation as dialogue also promotes evaluation as a generative process; even if findings are meant to be summative, the presentation of findings by youth and adult partners opens conversations that have the possibility of generating action, research to support action, and, through action, change.

As audiences bring their perspectives on the issue in question, they interact with the presentation to construct new meaning. This new meaning can take the form of new or better understanding of the issue. Or in the case of young people actively representing the findings of evaluation projects, the audience could gain new understandings of the capabilities of young people. According to Alcoff (1994), acknowledging the link between the representation of the inquiry and the understandings generated by audiences opens the possibility for dialogue.

Highlighting this link and presenting evaluation findings in a way that promotes dialogue is especially important for evaluation of youth-serving programs. In a field such as evaluation, the meanings stakeholder audiences construct affect programs and policies and the people they serve, and how those are administered and situated in communities. Based on what Schwandt (1996) called "the power of . . . dialogue for understanding ourselves and others" (p. 158), youth participation in the presentation of evaluation findings offers the opportunity for intergenerational conversation among stakeholders about experiences, programs and evaluations. This intergenerational dimension is important as when youth and adults interact, it is traditionally the adults who hold the decision-making power. Youth demonstrate, by presenting findings, the skills that they acquired as part of the evaluation process, the role they played in evaluation decision-making, and their commitment to participate in community change processes, therefore diminishing the power differential between the youth and the program/community stakeholders and decision makers.

Further, youth presentations that promote dialogue yield a new conceptualization of evaluation use that foregrounds the educative, conceptual applications of evaluation and encourage audiences to think about programs from multiple, new, and diverse perspectives. Evaluation and community research appear to be politically situated endeavors with the power to recontextualize the experiences of program stakeholders to fit the discourse of the evaluator/researcher, the expert (Schwandt, 1997). Thus, adults and youth jointly presenting evaluation findings sets the stage for multiple voices and perspectives to come forth, in dialogue, to describe the program experiences and evaluation findings.

The challenge is to represent evaluations in ways that reveal underlying structures of programs, decision-making processes, theories that frame the programs themselves, and assumptions, held by program and evaluation stakeholders, regarding social problems, social programs, and program participants. Youth participation in the presentation of evaluation findings offers the possibility of surfacing these issues for discussion. For example, when youth are engaged in decision- and meaning-making throughout the evaluation process, their presentation of the findings allows them not only to present the findings, per se, but also to offer their theories and perspectives on the issues that surfaced in the evaluation process.

Youth engagement in community research and evaluation and the subsequent presentation of evaluation findings all contribute to a process, articulated by Everitt (1996),

through which all those involved in social welfare practice are able not only to articulate their experiences but also to understand and politicize them. In these ways, through its processes as well as its products, evaluation may contribute to social change in the direction of the 'good', and may be developed to be accountable to principles of democratic process and democracy (p. 187).

This would be research and evaluation done for and with the people instead of on or about the people (Schwandt, 1996), encouraging "self-reflection and deeper understanding on the part of the researched" (Lather, 1991, p. 60) as well as generating understanding on the part of the audience and knowledge for the field.

The joint presentation of evaluation findings by youth and adult evaluation partners adds "to the depth of understanding about programs" and supports rather than supplants "the other knowledge and values that democratic societies employ to make social choices" (Weiss, 1990, p. 219).

Evaluation within this framework should, as Greene (1997) suggests, be viewed as a "force for democratizing public conversations about important public issues" (p. 28, emphasis original). When evaluation findings generated through an evaluation process that engaged youth as active partners are presented„by young people and adults together„to a diverse range of stakeholders it is the resulting dialogue that promotes evaluation use and serves democratizing interests.

Engaging young people in community evaluation and research is rewarding, invigorating, and often challenging work. The varied contexts, contents, and interdisciplinary purposes for this work create a complex mix of possibilities for promoting Community Youth Development in partnership with engaged evaluation practice. As a passionate cook in my spare time, I liken this process to the creation of a good vinaigrette; with the right ingredients, in the right proportion, and a bit of muscle to keep the elements in suspension, a wonderful product emerges that can enhance the flavor of a multitude of other delicious creations. Engaging youth in community evaluation and research adds a promising new element and process to otherwise good research, evaluation, and community development initiatives to promote democratic dialogue: as celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse would say, it "kicks it up a notch!"

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Leslie K. Goodyear, M.S., Ph.D., is the director of evaluation for City Year, a non-profit organization that unites a diverse corps of young people for a year of community service.

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