Advocacy and Policy Change TIG Week: Community-centered Policy Agenda by Jenny Perla

Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2025

Hi! My name is Jenny Perla (she/her/ella), Owner and Partner of Poder Consulting Group, a consultancy dedicated to connecting people and empowering communities by supporting the social sector with community engagement, research and evaluation, and policy and advocacy.

This past year I have been working with an organization that serves low-income families in Los Angeles in a variety of ways including running their own TK-8 schools, Head Start programs, and providing workforce development services for youth and mental health support for parents. We worked with the client to co-create a community-centered policy agenda that will guide the organization’s advocacy efforts. The organization has been providing direct services to families for decades but this is their first time entering the advocacy arena.

Instead of relying on policy “experts” and creating a staff-driven policy agenda, the team was very clear that they wanted to hear from the families they work with. Our guiding question: How might we engage the people most impacted to co-design a policy agenda?

Lesson Learned

While community-driven processes are the ideal, they are not always feasible. This doesn’t mean a community-informed process is not valuable! Evaluators and organizations should simply be clear and transparent about the parameters and purpose of the process they are asking communities to engage in. In our case, we clearly shared how we would engage community members and what we would do with the information and insights we gathered. 

Through a combination of surveys and listening sessions with families and frontline staff, we gathered a rich set of data and stories that will guide the organization’s policy agenda.

Hot Tips

• Be willing to adapt and meet the community where it’s at. We kicked off our first set of listening sessions in June 2025 in Los Angeles when ICE raids were also ramping up and driving fear throughout immigrant communities. We made a few adaptations including removing a survey question about perceptions of immigration & enforcement and hosting nearly all listening sessions via zoom instead of in-person. 
• Use data as a starting point for the conversation. During our listening sessions we wanted to go deeper in understanding families’ challenges and their visions for change. We started the conversation by sharing data from a survey we conducted with families. We then created some space for reactions and co-interpretation of the data by asking families what stood out to them in the data and what trends or patterns they noticed. This served as a great starting point for a much deeper conversation about their experiences and stories navigating these issues.
• Leverage organizing strategies to encourage storytelling. During my time working closely with organizers I learned many valuable lessons and frameworks for facilitating conversations. One framework is called “real vs. ideal” and it is simply a framework to ask people to share their dreams for their ideal world (e.g., what are students’ dreams for their ideal school) and then compare it to their “real” or current situation (e.g., what is the current assessment of schools?). During the listening sessions, we asked families what their ideal housing and jobs would look like and then asked what they are actually experiencing (e.g., what are their challenges in accessing affordable housing and good jobs?). 

Rad Resource

Read more about the framework “the world as it is” versus “the world as it should be” and its roots in community organizing here. 

Community-centered policy work takes time, and requires flexibility and attention to deeply complex and challenging issues. This work starts with listening—and when we listen well, families tell us exactly what needs to change. My hope is that more organizations will take that first, brave step toward co-creating policy and advocacy agendas with the communities most impacted. 

The American Evaluation Association is hosting APC TIG Week with our colleagues in the Advocacy and Policy Change Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our AP TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.