Rayna Brown: Relying on Experiences to Infuse Diverse Community-Based Approaches into Evaluation

Posted by randerson on January 19th, 2022 Posted in: NEC Profile

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Rayna Brown’s journey to a career in evaluation has been long and powerful.

Before returning to Northwestern and the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing (ISGMH), Brown, MA, MPH, was on a pre-med track, studied women and gender studies, then worked in Black feminism, activism, and reproductive justice.

Brown has held positions ranging from public health activism to sex education to outreach programming. She brings her expertise in equitable organizing and passion for activism to her current position as a research project coordinator on several projects at ISGMH.

Brown previously worked at Northwestern with the CFAR-funded IKNOW study (Women and PrEP) with Lisa Hirschhorn, MD, MPH, as well as on a PrEP adherence and usage study led Michael Newcomb, PhD, and Brian Mustanski, PhD.

Today, she infuses diverse community-based approaches into her work, advocating for individuals and working with qualitative methods that use measurements that are broader than just numbers.

“At ISGMH, I bring in my qualitative expertise, that’s how I find my niche in evaluation and in research,” she says.

Her work is crucial to making specific endeavors succeed, and she evaluates projects as they progress to make sure that they progress the way they should.

“On a daily basis, I take a project coordination and project management role,” says Brown. “I take what the grant says and help maintain the project from beginning to end.”

She admits that she is especially enamored by those who are working on community-based projects.

“I often get particularly pulled into those projects,” she says. “Because I have the expertise to set up the community-based pieces to make sure that they roll out the right way within the community.”

Her community work remains one of her most impactful driving forces. “I’m more passionate about doing the work with communities,” she says, “particularly around community health and disparity health.”

She willingly advocates for disadvantaged and underrepresented communities in a wide range of situations, which is one of the most important tasks facing evaluators in today’s world, she says. One of the most pressing issues she sees for evaluators today is the importance of centering projects with communities in mind.

“It may seem radical, but my work is about making research projects more about communities and less about the tedious structures that they are often designed in. I am always stressing: Are we really helping the community? Are we really serving the community?”

This goes much farther for Brown than just seeing community members as one, smaller, facet of organizing a project. She places the community front and center and radically pushes for recognition of this fact.

“When you are doing the work,” she says, “you must ask yourself, are you doing it for the community or for the organizers (for the people/institutions you are working with)? The challenge is staying true to that and not just following what the institution and founders want.”

She sees evaluation as a tool that works in partnership with communities and makes sure that her work directly reflects her aims. Currently, she is working on projects that are more community led and developing a matrix for and by the community about what works best.

She also wants to learn more about decolonizing structures in evaluation and academia. “It’s all about working with the community to demand better, to empower them, and to actively listen.”

At ISGMH, she is grateful that she is actively listened to.

“People respect my experience and I appreciate that,” she says. “One of the things I like best is that I get to pull from all of my prior jobs and prior experience to do this work well, all the stuff I learned on the ground I definitely pull from. I’m able to pull back and say ‘when I was in community, this is what was very important, this is what happened, and we definitely need to bring that into this project’ and I have the room to do that, have the space to do that, and that is very important.”

When she’s not working on pushing the limits of evaluation as a tool of the people and doing powerful community organizing work, Brown can often be found in the studio. She dances semi-professional in such styles as modern, Afro-Caribbean, and other African diasporic dance.

“Just like evaluation should be a tool that supports and uplifts everyone, dance, too, should be available for everyone,” she says, “I encourage anybody to dance, if you need to relax your mind or to concentrate, try to dance a little bit.”

Written by Rosemary Sissel