When an evaluation is labeled "participatory," who actually owns the design, the data, and the final story?
Too often, community involvement is flattened into extractive data collection or late-stage consultation. In this session, Bhargavi Thakur draws on real-world project experience to explore what it takes to move beyond surface-level participation toward communities as co-owners across design, implementation, and reporting.
More specifically, we will dive into two core strands:
Moving from consultation to co-ownership: Practical pathways for involving communities from the outset as co-designers, data gatherers, and co-authors of stories and reports.
Navigating unresolved tensions: Honest inquiry into the structural friction, institutional constraints, and residual power dynamics that persist even within highly progressive, community-centered evaluation.
You'll walk away with concrete entry points for shifting community roles across the project lifecycle, language and tactics for navigating donor constraints and institutional resistance, and peer exchange on handling power imbalances in practice.
🕒 A Note on Format: This is a 90-minute interactive gathering featuring a natural 60-minute soft exit. If your schedule only allows for an hour, you can drop in for the core input and initial peer sense-making!
Whether you are an evaluator, community organizer, or funder striving to make measurement a generative, community-led practice, you are wholeheartedly welcome to join us. We look forward to practicing out loud together!
Background about the community & event series
This gathering is part of Experiments in Regenerative Evaluation, a public event series hosted by Unity Effect and the global Regenerative Evaluation Community of Practice—an open network of over 250 practitioners, researchers, and network leaders shifting measurement from extractive compliance toward life-affirming learning. Further events of the series include:
Co-Host bios
Bhargavi Thakur is a mixed-methods, participatory researcher and musician. She is passionate about co-researching with communities and about reducing the distance and power between researchers and communities so that communities can use research for themselves and drive their own solutions and policymaking. Bhargavi has done participatory work in Chicago, US, and Bihar, India, advocating for and designing solutions toward better healthcare insurance and delivery programs, with a focus on racial and social equity. She has also used participatory methods to co-design a community hub for and with people experiencing homelessness in Chicago. Bhargavi is currently part of a network of evaluators and researchers working on regenerative and futures-first research evaluation practice, and is working to bring these practices into India and South Asia. She is also a South Asian classical singer and uses her art form to advocate for queer rights, caste equity, and deeper connection with ecology.
Jannik Kaiser (Unity Effect): Jannik is the Co-founder and CEO of Unity Effect, leading the development of Regenerative Measurement & Evaluation. He bridges complexity science, human sense-making, and ecosystem weaving to advocate for shifting evaluation from a compliance burden into a life-affirming practice.
