ICH was the evaluator for the second round of the Voices for Health Justice program (Voices 2.0), funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), building on our evaluation of the initial round of the program. RWJF established a Steering Committee, made up of staff from Community Catalyst, Community Change, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, with additional support from Altarum, to oversee the program. These organizations provided funding and technical assistance to 26 grantee organizations and their subgrantee partners, in 23 states across the United States. The program was designed to support organizations committed to health justice, racial justice, and anti-racism work. At its inception, the overarching program goals were oriented around health systems transformation, specifically increasing access to health care, making healthcare more affordable, and improving the ability of the healthcare system to treat all people with dignity. Voices centered community power building in its approach to health systems transformation, emphasizing the involvement and leadership of people impacted by the issues at hand. Building on our evaluation of Voices 1.0, we sought to understand and document how the program evolved from the previous grant cycle and how successful it was in attaining its goals.
ICH used a participatory and utilization-focused approach guided by the principles of equitable evaluation. This approach meant, among other things, that we were intentional in recognizing and valuing the expertise that grantees and other stakeholders have and incorporating their input in the evaluation design and methods. We also ensured that our work explored the contexts programs were operating in and how this impacted the goals, strategies, and outcomes in different states. Beginning with an initial design phase to develop an evaluation plan and continuing throughout the program, we worked closely with the Steering Committee overseeing the grant program; two consultants with deep experience and expertise in power-building programming, and an Evaluation Advisory Committee (EAC) made up of state grantees and subgrantees. The work with the EAC allowed us to ensure we regularly incorporated community input into our plans and that we elevated the priorities and perspectives of program stakeholders with diverse experiences. An Impact Map of the EAC experience was created to visualize the ways the EAC played a role in the Voices 2.0 experience for grantee members of the EAC.
Over the course of the program, we conducted interviews with Steering Committee members, technical assistance (TA) providers, and grantees to learn about program implementation and outcomes. We also conducted two surveys with program participants. The first was a Social Network Analysis survey distributed to all state grantees and subgrantees, as well as TA providers. Along with the responses from an additional survey of grantees, ICH used the responses from the SNAs to better understand the evolving relationships among grantee organizations. Towards the end of the grant period, we disseminated a second survey to all state grantees and subgrantees to collect information about their experiences and the outcomes of their work. Additionally, we partnered with five state teams to conduct case studies. With case study states, we attended TA calls, and conducted additional interviews and site visits, to delve more deeply into the details of their experience with Voices in a context-specific manner. The findings from these case studies were documented in the form of individual memos (see below).
In addition to the data collection designed to help us understand the Voices program more generally, we did additional exploration of several program elements that deserved further study. We worked with state teams that experienced forms of conflict, including those that had required TA-led interventions as part of a resolution or mitigation effort, to identify commonalities within the perceived sources of conflict and document successful strategies for conflict resolution, and produced a memo with our learnings. The evaluation team worked with the EAC to write a memo about how funders can build the most effective programming from a grantee’s perspective. Through the evaluation, we sought to gather data about the impact of the Voices 2.0 program and to generate actionable recommendations about how funders can support local efforts to build community power for health justice.
You can click on the following states to see the case study memos that are currently available: