In 2017, Ron Dwyer-Voss delivered a series of workshops around Australia on ‘The Power of Local Knowledge’. Evaluation is often considered a source of knowledge about a community, but has often been done by agencies from outside of communities, with little influence or involvement from communities, for purposes not defined by or useful to communities. This tradition has often followed a colonial methodology – taking a natural resource (local knowledge and experience) and converting it to something of value for the evaluator (report, published article, grant proposal, etc.) without rewarding the original owner of the resource.

It is possible to chart a better path that keeps the power and value of evaluation and learning with the local community. We can begin to shift the power of evaluation by applying several critical questions: What is being evaluated? Why the evaluation is being done? How evaluation is done? Who is doing the evaluating? For whom evaluation is being done? Evaluation that measures impact can start by defining what impact is desired by the local community and how can the community investigate its story in a way that empowers itself and strengthens its relationships with power outside the community.