One year later, CCHE reflects on our commitment to EID

During the past year, incidents of racism and social injustice have weighed heavily on our hearts while fortifying our resolve to address the impacts of inequity.

The Center for Community Health and Evaluation stands against all forms of injustice and discrimination, and we remain dedicated to achieving equity and inclusion for all. This principle is core to our mission to improve the health of communities through collaborative approaches to planning, assessment, and evaluation.

In 2020, we committed to deepening our reflection, learning, and actions to use our power and privilege to name the inequity and racism that we see around us and contribute to building more just systems and practices.

Since then, CCHE has worked to advance this commitment in three ways: investing time in self-reflection and understanding our own biases, assessing our organizational culture, and strengthening our evaluation practice. This is ongoing work and we do not have all the answers; we share our progress in the spirit of learning. We will continue to assess and modify these approaches as our own understanding grows.

• Investing in self-reflection. Our team members committed both work and personal time to increasing our foundational understanding of equity, inclusion, and diversity (EID) principles. Through book clubs, self-reflections, CCHE discussions, and Kaiser Permanente-sponsored trainings, we focused on increasing allyship and adopting anti-racist practices. Because learning never ends, CCHE will encourage continued team and individual commitments to expanding our EID competencies.
• Assessing our organizational culture. Aided by an assessment tool from Cultures Connecting, we embarked on a series of facilitated discussions to reflect on our organizational culture as it relates to EID. From these discussions, we identified three areas to focus on in 2021, and formed work groups to address each one. CCHE is monitoring our progress on these goals and will recalibrate at least annually.
• Strengthening our evaluation practice. In our evaluations we strive to: 

1. More systematically incorporate equitable evaluation and anti-racist principles
2. Reflect on where we are falling short and turn our realizations in concrete action
3. Work harder to elevate voices that are not being heard and incorporate their views and values into decision making and implementation of projects intended to improve community health
4. Consider whose questions we are answering in our evaluations and explore alternative perspective
5. Build capacity for collection and disaggregation of data to better understand impact of inequitable systems on different segments of the community
6. Advocate for evaluation plans that serve the communities intended to benefit from community health projects and initiatives

To assist with incorporating these principles, CCHE developed an internal EID peer review process to ensure that our commitment to centering equity in our evaluations is explicit in both approach and measurement. To facilitate this process, we developed a discussion guide that is informed by emerging best practices in the evaluation field. We have started to incorporate this process into our evaluation planning as well as in recalibrations of our existing evaluations.

To access the discussion guide, click here.