11: Building an Evaluators' Community of Practice: A Collaborative Approach to Shared Leadership and Inclusive Engagement

Evaluation professionals often work in isolation within their respective clients (states, municipalities, universities or other organizations), but face common challenges in regard to data collection, performance measurement, and stakeholder engagement. Recognizing this, we launched a structured Community of Practice (CoP) for evaluators of grantees in education for a specific state-level federal discretionary grant program. Our aim to foster a network of mutual support, shared learning, and collaborative problem-solving. We engage participants about the strategies they’ve used to start similar groups, their experiences with them. We used the Purpose-to-Practice (P2P) structure to build a collective ideal that shows early signs of being the engaging and meaningful community we hoped it would be. This presentation will detail the evidence-based road plan we used, the group’s eventual formation, and the principles and structures that we co-created, illustrating how it aligns with the Evaluation 2025 theme of Engaging Communities, Sharing Leadership, and Transforming Evaluation.