Meet Our Partners: Toni Mack

At Engage R+D we are constantly reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning, including in partnership with our peers and colleagues in evaluation, philanthropy, and community organizations. In this interview Toni Mack, Executive Director of Youth United for Change in Philadelphia, shares her perspectives on the role of evaluation and learning in community and youth organizing.

Can you give some background on Youth United for Change? 

Youth United for Change (YUC) started as a drug and alcohol prevention program in the mid 1990s as a “just say no” type of prevention program. About a decade ago, there was a transition in leadership, and YUC started to focus on root causes with a focus on why young people were wanting to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. “Say no to drugs” became a way to examine what is going on in our schools and our communities and understand where we can make change at the system level so we can disrupt some of the oppressive forces young people are experiencing. The organization shifted to youth and community organizing, along with civic engagement, get out the vote, and political education. The YUC mission now is to engage African American and Latino youth and young adults of Philadelphia to give them a critical understanding of economic and political systems so they are equipped to see through social transformation in their own interest. We teach Black and brown people about organizing so they can gain skills to shape their world. 

How does evaluation help facilitate community work, where does it fit in? 

At YUC, evaluation is essential. It’s one of the ways we ensure that our actions are in alignment with our intentions, and it’s an accountability tool for our members, our constituents, and our funding partners. Evaluation allows us to talk about impact and provide the details of how we are showing up to be part of the conversation with our constituents and our members. We see evaluation as useful at the end of an initiative, but also as an ongoing process. Evaluation allows us to pivot in real time. After our community meetings, education workshops, and at the end of learning sessions, we do a debrief and are able to shift for the next meeting, rather than wait until next year or the next program. For youth organizers, data is really important.

How does evaluation show up in youth organizing in particular?

This past year we started a youth leadership team, made up of 10 young people who were engaged with us for three-six week cycles of learning and building. They came into the work with all sorts of questions–really fundamental ones–about money and justice and their place in the work. We hosted a session about critical thinking, what is qualitative and what is quantitative data, and how can we start to explore answers to questions with different types of data. We then worked with Qiana (Davis, Senior Consultant with Engage R+D) to codesign our next session with peer leaders exploring what data is, how to use it, and how to understand it. The youth were really into it and wanted to do a survey to better understand what Black and brown youth ages 13-25 think about their strengths and needs related to civic engagement, housing, mental health, and public safety. Together, we are teaching youth leaders research methods, like how to design a survey, and the group will then learn about survey analysis and reporting out. Ultimately, through bar charts and summaries, we’ll learn more about our community’s priorities and recommendations, and that will inform our programming. 

What shifts are you seeing in evaluation and/or philanthropy and what promise do those hold for the work going on in communities?

Research and learning are now seen more as a conversation versus an extractive process. What really is going on, and what are some objective measures to create a common language or common understanding? Whether we get there via numbers, focus groups, or stories, the process needs to be responsive to how we see it. It was Engage R+D that recommended the codesign approach with youth, really partnering to get to where we can see learnings. On the community end of things, we are seeing data and evaluation as supportive of our work, where we and partners see evaluation as a tool to learn and disrupt current power dynamics. Traditionally, evaluators have come in from the outside telling communities what they are doing wrong. Narrative building and storytelling, however, are asset based, not just a telling of deficiencies, but what are the resiliencies? What are the facilitative factors identifying what is right, not just a focus on what is wrong? 

I love data; I love being able to show evidence. With the youth it’s about, “Let’s see what it actually tells us, what we learn.” Especially where historically social research has been weaponized and pathologized, using data positively is a reclamation. We are demystifying research with our young people, and it’s powerful.