Longitudinally Evaluating a Community Council Comprised of Community Members

Background: Community Councils (CC) continue to be used in community engaged research, particularly with Community Based Participatory Research. Most CCs include some or all agency representatives; few are exclusively populated solely by community members. Evaluating a council’s development can gauge its maturation. While many group evaluation instruments are available, to our knowledge, no tool has been utilized longitudinally with a community member based council to assess composition, development, and progress.

Objectives: To describe the recruitment, retention and monthly and quarterly evaluation processes over the first 4 years of a newly established CC.

Methods: A monthly and quarterly survey was developed. The Community Council Evaluation Survey (CCES) was a short survey developed for use at each meeting to provide immediate feedback. The Quarterly Review Survey (QRS), adapted from University of Wisconsin’s “Community Group Member Survey”, was a longer survey for use quarterly assessing for group functioning, maturation, and sense of achievement.

Conclusions: The CCES, administered 31 times, provided feedback on what engagement methods participants preferred and overall meeting experience. Across 7 administrations of the QRS, council members reported improvements in trust, listening to others, meeting accomplishments and ability to work with others. Both the CCES and the QRS tools were easy to implement, provided direct member feedback, and identified areas for improvement. The CCES was a quick assessment of meetings. The QRS was a useful longitudinal and more comprehensive assessment that included group dynamics, progress, and maturation. Although the QRS was implemented semi-annually rather than quarterly, this was deemed adequate.