Date: Thursday, February 26, 2026
Hello AEA365 community! I’m Dr. Kinsey Simone, a faculty member and evaluator working at the intersection of community engagement, mental health research, and curiosity-centered evaluation. In this post, I share lessons learned and rad resources from evaluating Mad Topics, an interdisciplinary initiative that blends praxis, research, and education to advance mental-health literacy through lived-experience-centered community engagement.
Grounded in Mad Studies, Mad Topics centers voices historically labeled “mad” while intentionally engaging clinicians, educators, students, first responders, and community members. Since launching in 2024, Mad Topics symposia have reached over 1,000 participants, addressing topics such as OCD, ADHD, anxiety, and depression. Evaluating this work required approaches capable of capturing emergence, relationality, and community-generated knowledge, rather than relying solely on predefined program benchmarks.
Traditional evaluations often begin with fixed questions and predetermined outcomes. In contrast, evaluation of Mad Topics symposia began by intentionally centering curiosity: asking diverse stakeholders what questions mattered most to them and allowing those questions to shape evaluation pathways over time.
This required investing in understanding lived experience across socio-demographic contexts and in relationship to the mental health topic. Because Mad Topics centers lived experience as expertise, understanding how participants experienced symposia was essential for determining what constituted evaluative “success.” Observations, individual and focus-group interviews, retrospective post-surveys, and ongoing stakeholder dialogue were used to define impact in practice. This curiosity-centered stance revealed unanticipated outcomes related to belonging, collective meaning-making, and community ownership.
To honor community priorities without sacrificing evaluative rigor, evaluators can adopt a researcher mindset that treats evaluation as a flexible, iterative inquiry process rather than a fixed endpoint. Key participatory strategies can include:
Together, these approaches allow evaluation methods to follow community-generated outcomes rather than constrain them.
When community members co-define evaluation questions, outcomes that traditional metrics often overlook rise to the surface. Capturing these impacts requires mixed-method and trauma-informed approaches that honor complexity and lived meaning.
Importantly, evaluation within community-driven evaluands like Mad Topics should function as part of a continuous learning cycle: evaluation insights inform research directions; research findings shape program design; and evolving praxis generates new evaluation questions. This iterative loop strengthens community-driven innovation over time while offering a richer picture of the evaluand experience alongside more conventional success metrics.
Statement of AI Use: An AI-assisted drafting tool was used to support organization, clarity, and alignment with AEA365 blog guidelines. The author revised, edited, and finalized all content to ensure accuracy, voice, and fidelity to the Mad Topics initiative and evaluation practices described.
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