Behavioral Health TIG Week: Riding Alongside Innovation: Evaluating the Farmworker Equity Express by Vanessa Guerrero

Date: Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Hello! I’m Vanessa Guerrero, an evaluator with a focus on evaluating community-based behavioral health programs across California. One of the most powerful projects I’ve supported is the Farmworker Equity Express, a culturally grounded, mobile behavioral health program serving Latinx farmworkers in San Mateo County.

Launched in 2023 by Ayudando Latinos A Soñar (ALAS), this mobile three-year pilot program brings culturally grounded bilingual behavioral health services, ranging from individual, couples, and family therapy to grief and art as resistance groups, to farmworkers and their families via the Health Equity Express bus. The bus visits several farms across Half Moon Bay. Central to the program is to meet people where they are, literally and emotionally, and to weave in cultural arts activities like Mexican folklorico dance, music, Lotería, and Dia de Los Muertos altar-making.

The evaluation of this program uses a mixed-methods, culturally responsive approach guided by four key questions. However, what became clear early on was that when an innovative program is in motion like the Farmworker Equity Express, the evaluation must move with it.

Lessons Learned: Flexibility Isn’t a Constraint, It’s the Work

Throughout the first year, ALAS and the evaluation team co-adapted constantly in response to real-world conditions: flooding and storms disrupted mobile services, staff transitioned, and the team navigated moments of crisis, including fears associated with the new political climate and housing insecurity. And yet, the program continued to meet farmworkers with care, creativity, and cultural grounding.

For us as evaluators, these moments called for reflection, not rigor. When community members’ livelihoods and safety are under threat, the evaluation must pause, acknowledge, and recalibrate.

The evaluation also became a collaborative, capacity-building process. We trained ALAS staff to facilitate focus groups with farmworker participants, a train-the-trainer model that honored existing trust relationships and centered community voice in the data collection process.

Hot Tips for Evaluators Working with Innovative, Community-Rooted Programs

1. Let the rhythm of the community guide the tempo of evaluation
   Evaluation timelines should reflect local realities like harvest seasons, weather disruptions, or cultural holidays. And in times of community crisis, evaluators must pause and bear witness. Staying flexible in these moments is not a delay, it’s a commitment to ethical and human-centered practice.
2. Co-create everything you can
   From surveys to protocols, build tools collaboratively with program staff and participants. This fosters ownership, cultural fit, and trust.
3. Use participatory strategies like train-the-trainer models
   In our case, ALAS staff were trained and provided with a stipend to facilitate focus groups. Their involvement made space for more honest, grounded dialogue and strengthened evaluation capacity within the organization.
4. Document how the evaluation evolves
   Innovation lives in the pivots. Keep track of how the evaluation changes in response to the program, the community, and external factors. These stories of adaptation are part of the learning.

Programs like the Farmworker Equity Express remind us that innovation isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a commitment to meet people where they are. And in doing so, our evaluations must meet the moment too.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Behavioral Health TIG Week with our colleagues in Behavioral Health Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Behavioral Health 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.