Developing a Policy Advocacy Evaluation Approach through Community Organizing: A Promising Framework for Evaluating Reproductive Justice Strategies in California

Policy advocacy, or efforts to influence public policy through various forms of persuasive communication, has emerged in the field of public health as a critical strategy to promoting health, rights, and justice. In California, a strong policy advocacy movement to promote reproductive justice for Latinas has begun to unfold and gain momentum. Reproductive justice is understood as the complete well-being of women based on the full protection of human rights and social justice. This reproductive justice movement is essential to ensuring that Latina women achieve improved reproductive health outcomes, gain greater access to reproductive health services, and eradicate the various forms of structural oppression that compromise their health.

Although traditional program evaluation approaches have been applied to evaluate policy advocacy efforts, evaluators encounter challenges when doing so because of the dynamic and fast-paced nature of policy advocacy work. In response, grant-making organizations have been at the forefront of developing frameworks for evaluating policy advocacy. However, because policy advocacy strategies that promote reproductive justice for Latinas share the principles of community organizing, the purpose of this culminating experience project was to develop an approach for the evaluation of policy advocacy strategies utilizing community organizing principles, with an emphasis on evaluating reproductive justice efforts on behalf of Latinas in California. This evaluation framework identifies key components of a promising evaluation framework and recommendations on how to operationalize these components given time and resource limitations.