In mid-April, Katie Kristensen, manager, Equitable Evaluation, and Christina Johnson presented at the Collective Impact Forum Summit, sharing their session “Storytelling as Evidence in Equity-Centered Evaluation”. Christina Johnson, program associate at the National Collaborative for Health (NCHE), partnered with Katie on the evaluation of NCHE’s Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing (CoHLI). The two leaders presented on behalf of the larger teams that worked on the evaluation.
Drawing on their work with NCHE, Success Measures, in partnership with Datashine, used storytelling to evaluate the community and field-level impacts of the program. They shared why they chose this approach, how it expanded findings, and the step-by-step process of incorporating storytelling into evaluation. Overall, they framed storytelling as both a rigorous method for generating evidence and centering participant voice in the evaluation.
As Katie described it, “Storytelling is a qualitative methodology that begins with listening. It is holistic, collaborative, and creative—grounded in meaning-making. It creates space for people to interpret and share their experiences in their own words, making it especially well-suited for participatory evaluation.”
During the presentation, Christina reflected on the importance of a strong partnership for the success of the work, “Success Measures was a great evaluation partner for us because they really grasped the heart of our work…they approached the collaboration with total curiosity and their work always reflected that they heard and understood us.”
This piece was initially shared in our July 2026 Newsletter. Subscribe to our newsletter here to keep up with future Success Measures news.