At ICH, one of our core organizational values is the belief that incorporating diverse perspectives is essential to harnessing a community’s strengths and promoting social justice. Across projects, we strive to ensure that our work represents, includes the voices of, and creates value for all communities impacted by programs and interventions. ICH’s approach to understanding and working with diverse and underserved communities is built on a foundation of participation and stakeholder involvement. Rather than assuming that we already understand a given population because of prior work, we approach each project and community with fresh eyes. We strive to advancing equity through our work, and we utilize the Equitable Evaluation Framework to guide our work and keep an equity focus at the forefront.
Our approach: The ICH difference
Our collaborative and flexible approach ensures that all of our clients receive customized services that meet their individual needs. We seek to involve stakeholders and community members in our work to the extent possible, so that we can hear from them about their strengths, needs, and priorities, and be responsive to that in our work. We tailor our participatory approach to each project’s needs and goals.
We prioritize building long-term partnerships, and adapt our services as your goals and capabilities change over time. We aim to build sustained, trusting relationships with clients and partners and work closely together to identify how we can best support programs as they grow and develop.
We aim to advance equity through evaluation that is rooted in community-based participatory methods. To us, equitable evaluation is not a pre-defined approach that can be applied the same way to all projects – rather, we see it as a path that requires thoughtful reflection to identify how we can deepen our understanding, tailor our approaches, and work to keep improving our practice over time in partnership with communities and program stakeholders.
We continuously work to build our internal organizational capacity around equity-focused approaches through methods workshops, guided discussions about projects, and informal discussions. We work to create space for staff members to explore complex and sensitive topics in a supported manner, and to facilitate reflection and introspection for individual staff members and for the organization overall
We emphasize feasibility and will make sure that the project design is both methodologically sound and practical to implement within your unique context. Usability of results is a guiding principle of all our work. From beginning to end, we strive to make sure that project results create value for stakeholders and communities and can be used to drive decision-making and action.