Editorial
| Author | John Guenther |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1035719X221112981 |
| Subject Matter | Editorial |
Editorial
Evaluation Journal of Australasia
2022, Vol. 22(3) 139–141
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/1035719X221112981
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Editorial
John Guenther
Our third issue of the Evaluation Journal of Australasia (EJA) for 2022 brings together a
diverse set of articles that cover a lot of ground—from evaluation capacity building, to
suicide prevention programs, and evaluator processes of critical reflection, along with
some rich, personal evaluator perspectives and a great evaluation text book review.
The article from Delyth Lloyd, Eleanor Williams, and Desiree Terrill on evaluation
capacity building (ECB) in an Australian state government department shines a light on
the importance of evaluative skills in a government service delivery context. The
ultimate aim of ECB in the department was to create a “culture of evaluation and
research with all departmental decision making, policies and practice informed by high
quality evidence.”The evaluation of the program reports high levels of satisfaction with
the training offered, even as it transitioned to online delivery during COVID-19
lockdowns in 2020. While initial knowledge and awareness was raised among par-
ticipants, what I think is perhaps more significant is what the non-participants, par-
ticularly leaders and executives think. According to the evaluation, few people in this
key group within the organization participated, and in my reading of the findings, this
presents a significant barrier to achieving the vision described above. The authors have
quite rightly picked up on this in their conclusions. It is a good lesson that other large
organizations may take note of—don’t forget the leaders!
One of the huge challenges facing many Indigenous communities across Australia is
how to address high rates of suicide. The article by John Guenther, Mona Roberts,
Keith Buzzacott, and Danielle Dyall reports on an evaluation of an Indigenous led
program in the Northern Territory called “Suicide Story.”Suicide Story is a suicide
prevention program—it is designed to help people to identify warning signs, open up
difficult conversations, and provide support to people who do not know where to look
for help. It aims to build resilience. It was designed by Indigenous people in central
Australia for Indigenous people. A key plank of the program is its focus on cultural
safety. While the evaluation reported here was not designed to determine how many
lives were saved—which is problematic for several reasons—what it does show is how
important cultural safety is for building resilience. It avoids the trap of many inter-
ventions that are delivered into Indigenous communities by outsiders, which inevitably
result in a focus on fixing deficits, failures, and problems rather than giving power to
people to develop solutions and strategies “their way.”As the chief investigator for the
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