Why this Toolkit?
The need for evaluation
In response to widespread gender-based violence occurring in educational institutions, Quebec passed Bill 151 in 2017 to mandate that all post-secondary institutions in the province be required to implement and evaluate policies and procedures to combat and prevent sexual violence on campus. This bill created a specific demand for evaluation materials as educational institutions are now required to develop and evaluate strategies to address gender-based sexual violence on campus. Additionally, community organizations are also developing project-based strategies to address gender-based sexual violence. These institutions and organizations are often called upon to evaluate their strategies in order to justify implementation to boards, directors, and funding organizations. Most significantly, people who are developing and implementing strategies often want to evaluate them so that they can improve their strategies and understand where to most efficiently allocate resources.
Over the past several years, the Atwater Library and Computer Centre has been working with many post-secondary institutions and community groups on developing, implementing and evaluating strategies to end rape culture on campus. The strategies range in scope from grassroots, participant-led initiatives to broader strategies that inform institutional change. We observed that there are many effective, innovative and creative strategies addressing sexual violence and rape culture across campuses. However, there was very little assessment being done to determine which strategies were effective at addressing specifically stated objectives. Our stakeholders often had opinions or feelings about the effectiveness of the strategies they were implementing, but many times they lacked the data to support their observations or impressions. Creating opportunities for evaluation that helped stakeholders answer their questions about the issues or situations on campus that contribute to gender-based sexual violence and rape culture, understand the effectiveness of strategies from the perspectives of the people most impacted, and determine what aspects of the issue to address next became of focus of our project. Many of our partners do not have the resources necessary to evaluate their strategies in order to understand whether they are creating the change that they are hoping to achieve. Evaluation frameworks thus became the central theme of our work and we developed this toolkit to support the evaluation of strategies used to address sexual violence and rape culture on campus.
In our work developing and implementing strategies to address social issues, we have often observed that participants, facilitators and organizers alike can sometimes be resistant to evaluation. Although they want to know whether their strategies were effective and have questions that an evaluation would answer, the evaluation process itself sometimes feels challenging. For organizers, it often feels like an extra chore to ‘add on’. Evaluation is often done towards the end of a project when energy may be low and evaluation may feel overwhelming and overly complicated. Organizers and facilitators may fear ‘failing’ at evaluation. Facilitators and participants sometimes feel that evaluation takes time away from the strategy, that it’s boring or meaningless. Often organizations do not have the time, resources or institutional expertise to engage in the evaluation they want or are required to do and end up giving it only cursory lip service.
In acknowledgement of both the importance but also the challenge evaluation poses, our goal here was to design an evaluation toolkit to address and support the specific and unique requirements of stakeholders who are implementing and evaluating strategies to address rape culture and gender-based sexual violence in their institutions. In our search for ways to make evaluation a more positive and essential experience, we have found that employing arts-based, participatory approaches can help mitigate the negative perceptions and experiences around evaluation and can make evaluation a more relevant, less onerous and seamless aspect of their programs. This toolkit will provide guidelines and practical suggestions on how to use these approaches by presenting feminist, trauma-informed, survivor-centered, participatory, art-based, and ethical tools for evaluating strategies and programming.