Date and time: Wednesday 5 April 2023, 4.30- 5.30pm ACST
Topic: How documentary film (narrative data) can be used to reimagine equity, social justice and decolonization within evaluation of Indigenous programs in remote Australia.
Location: online via zoom, details will be shared just prior to the event.  
Presenter: Susan Rooney-Harding
Register online by: 12pm, Tuesday 4 April 2023

Event Description: 

Highlighting transformations in diversity and power from both an evaluation commissioner & consultants experience. This presentation will address how our methodologies and values strengthen and build Indigenous and non-Indigenous capacity, trust and reconciliation.
Told from filmmaker and evaluator’s perspective, this presentation addresses how an existing evaluation methodology (Most Significant Change) has been adapted and used to collect narrative data to create documentaries to be used in the evaluation analysis, visual reports and beyond. We will be looking at how this method embraced the values and authentic perspectives of First Nations people and other players within the team and communities.
Susan will also discuss how we as a team of white women, worked alongside a First Nations lead team and how we turned the lens on our own deep colonisation, helping us to understand and address our unconscious colonising patterns and behaviours in our professional and personal lives.

About the Presenter:

Susan is a documentary filmmaker and a creative qualitative data specialist.
She is the founder of The Story Catchers - Stories for Purpose and co-created a methodology that uses film and community participatory approaches in human-centred design, monitoring, evaluation, social impact measurement and reporting.
This methodology uses Most Significant Change technique that has been adapted to aid the use of film. This supports communities to tell and share their stories and assists evaluators to understand the complexities of community conditions of well-being and to quantitatively assess certain aspects of wellbeing.
This methodology enhances the individual and collective voice and empowers communities to actively co-create and evaluate their own projects and programs. We have been using our methodology for a decade with a focus on program design, development, evaluation, and reporting of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs across Australia.
The Story Catchers have worked within the areas of health, education, employment, energy and mining and human service delivery. The stories are utilised to assist in analysing the narrative data and to create documentary reports (docu-video reports) that accompany the written reports. This creating a more accessible and inclusive report delivery method for all audiences.
Susan has worked for the Australian Broadcast Corporation and has extensive experience in documentary film and using this medium for evaluation and reporting. She has undertaken extensive remote field-work within Aboriginal communities throughout Australia.
Susan is a member of the Australian Evaluation Society and the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance.

This is a free event organised & hosted by the South Australian Regional Network of the AES. Our seminar series provides an opportunity for you to meet with AES members and others in the evaluation community and to share and learn from the experiences of fellow evaluators.

Session start times:

• SA, NT: 4.30pm

• VIC, NSW, ACT, TAS, QLD: 5.00pm

• WA: 3.00pm

• New Zealand: 7.00pm