Past Issues

LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation TIG Week: Community Data Parties for Research (and Evaluation) Justice by Veronica S. Smith

Date: Thursday, June 11, 2026

Pride month brings AEA a rainbow of insights, perspectives, and practices of LGBTQIA+ evaluators. These posts from the LGBTQ+ Voices in Evaluation TIG feature belonging, community, collaboration, creativity, context, and advocacy. We hope they prove to be a treasure trove for the entire evaluation community.

I am Veronica S. Smith, MS (she/they), a community data and evaluation guide and solopreneur of data2insight.

I partner with LGBTQ-serving organizations doing community-driven data collection, analysis, and storytelling that centers lived experiences and everyday realities. This work is informed by The Coalition of Communities of Color’s research justice strategy guidelines:

Community members are experts.
Communities are positioned as researchers not just subjects of research and inquiry.
Communities can conduct critical and systemic inquiry into their own lived experiences.
QTBIPOC knowledge and expertise can counter dominant cultural narratives

Hot Tips

A community data party is an activity we use in our work to grow trust across ecosystem actors and capacity to conduct critical and systemic inquiry. A data party is an in-person event where diverse community members collectively analyze and make sense of data, equitable research method for community engagement.

A data party’s purpose is to:

encourage people to make sense of data together,
center community members’ in use of data to make policy, law, and/or provide resources to benefit a community,
gives the community informed decision making.

The potential benefits of a data party are:

increased community research knowledge and interpretation of data,
data sense making happens within a community,
community-backed recommendations to inform the community, policymakers, lawmakers, and funders.

Team leaders Kory Higgs, a Black person with black t-shirt and headwrap, and Veronica Smith, a white person with a pink turtleneck, and glasses, stand beside a Community Data Party welcome sign. The sign features people carrying Pride flags and logos of The Collaborative lead organizations. — *The South King County LGBTQ+ Collaborative Community (The Collaborative) Data Party, May 13, 2026*

Lessons Learned

Kory Higgs, and I co-facilitated a community data party for The Collaborative, made up of Queer Power Alliance, POCAAN, Entre Hermanos, and Pacific Northwest Black Pride. Our focus was gathering community members to make sense of survey results about economic stability for South King County LGBTQIA+ residents. About 25 folks joined for food, music, community, and conversation.

A group of five people wearing face masks sit around a white round table engaged in conversation at the community data party. The person in the center, wearing a teal/green sweatshirt, is speaking and gesturing with their hands. The table has data placemats. In the right background is a poster with graphs.

The roundtable discussions were the event highlight. Attendees reviewed data placemats featuring information and questions about the three focus areas of transportation, healthcare, voting and civic engagement. Conversations reflected on experiences, challenges, and possible solutions.

One party goer said they enjoyed the conversations and want more time to continue those conversations. Another appreciated that findings were shared in plain language and easy to make sense of compared to some research findings that “make me feel dumb.”

The Collaborative is building on this work to co-create a 2027 legislative agenda to improve economic stability for South King County LGBTQIA+ residents.

Rad Resources

These great resources are from Corey Newhouse and Dana Benjamin, leaders of Public Profit and Back of the Napkin (respectively).

This Stanford Social Innovation Review article explains how overreliance on dominant data fails communities and how community data provides a solution.

Community Data Is Trusted Evidence by Mira Mohsini & Andres Lopez

Culturally Responsive and Equitable Data Parties: A Method for Participatory Analysis and Sense-Making in Virtual Spaces

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