Katie Sanders, a doctoral candidate in the Agricultural Leadership, Education and Communication department at the University of Georgia, travelled to Boston, Massachusetts this month to present research at the American Public Health Association. Sanders, part of the evaluation team for Healthier Together, participated in a roundtable discussion about the challenges evaluating rural communities and how hybrid approaches to evaluation can be more responsive to the needs of rural participants. Authors on the work included Alexa Lamm, Kristin Gibson, and Tatevik Markosyan.
As part of the discussion, Sanders discussed lessons learned from her time evaluating Healthier Together, including how to integrate cultural norms into evaluation and using forms of empowerment evaluation when working with under-resourced communities. Moving forward, Sanders hopes to build a toolkit for evaluating rural communities, as well as creating new communications resources to help increase community engagement around Extension-based rural community development projects. To learn more about Sanders’ research related to Healthier Together, click here.
