- Comprehensive Community Initiatives represent a promising approach to address overrepresentation of Aboriginal children and families in child welfare systems.
- Overrepresentation of Aboriginal children and families in child protection systems constitutes a ‘wicked’ or complex social problem that is intertwined with a host of individual, social, and structural issues impacting Aboriginal well-being.
- In the past ten years we have become aware that complex or wicked problems require comprehensive community change strategies that enable coordination across a range of individuals and sectors at the community level to achieve social and systems level change.
- If we are to advance such initiatives as a strategy to enhance Aboriginal well-being we need better ways of evaluating their impacts and outcomes.
- Community change participants often want evaluation to help them learn what’s working and what’s not in order to develop, correct, or adapt their efforts in service of a broader vision for their community.
- Funders and policy makers often want evaluation to help them establish evidence that can inform their decision making.
- Evaluation approaches should be meaningful to Aboriginal people reflecting Indigenous ways of knowing and approaches to research while being grounded in local culture, traditions, and protocol that are guided by Elders.
- We currently have limited knowledge of culturally relevant and respectful approaches that can guide learning and development/adaptation.
- And there are clear tensions between evaluative approaches that reflect Indigenous ways of knowing and enable learning and development, and evaluative approaches where the goal is to establish generalizable and translatable evidence for funding or policy making.
- Research is needed regarding evaluation of comprehensive community initiatives to enhance Aboriginal well-being that respect Indigenous ways of knowing and approaches to research, while also enabling context specific learning and development, and establishing evidence relevant to funders and policy makers.
- This is an ambitious agenda that will require strong commitment by many groups but one that will have national and international relevance.
- Contributing to this knowledge development offers opportunities for dialogue among multiple stakeholders at multiple levels and will extend the excellent scholarship currently occurring on Indigenous Methodologies in research.
