Elevating Community Care: Building Evaluation Capacity for Brain Health
摘要
Community organizations play a critical role in supporting the complex and dynamic needs of people living with brain health conditions; yet they often lack the capacity to evaluate their work and demonstrate their impacts in ways that resonate with policymakers and traditional healthcare systems. This creates an imbalance in evidence production, which, in turn, often leads to the undervaluing and underfunding of community-based solutions for brain health. Interested in the types of supports intermediary organizations can provide to help community organizations better demonstrate their impacts, this chapter explores a program called GEEK—Growing Expertise in Evaluation and Knowledge Translation—which was created by the Ontario Brain Institute to address asymmetries in evidence production between community organizations and formal healthcare institutions. Through an exploration of the GEEK program and some of the community projects it has supported, we aim to shed light on how investing in community through direct funding and evaluation capacity building can help community organizations demonstrate their value and become better integrated into the broader healthcare system.