What counts? For whom?: Cultural beacons and unexpected areas of programmatic impact

• Deductively determined evaluations insufficiently capture programmatic change.
• Local, grassroots ways of knowing are often overlooked but yield legitimate data.
• Cultural Beacons are culturally-embedded, user-defined indicators of change.
• This article lays the foundation for the exploration of Cultural Beacons in program evaluation.
• Program evaluations can be enriched by adding an inductive layer to deductive orientations.

The present article was motivated by our observations that (1) current methods for gathering data do not wholly capture program-related transformations, and (2) grassroots ways of knowing yield legitimate data and can enrich programmatic efforts and evaluations. Accordingly, our work seeks to leverage grassroots knowledge in order to both recognize and respect cultural beacons (CBs) – culturally embedded, user-defined aids for understanding program-related change. Simply, these inductively gathered, locally identified CBs illuminate what to measure and/or how to measure it. Our analysis of participatory evaluations from four international, social change interventions offers four sites for detecting CBs: material possessions, community landscape features, social behaviors, and community-inspired art. We examine the methodological and relational contexts that facilitate CB discovery, discuss unexpected areas of programmatic impact, and utilize lessons learned across projects to make suggestions for continued exploration of CBs in monitoring and evaluation design and practice.