Weaving evaluation into the Waipā ecosystem: Placing evaluation in an indigenous place-based educational program

Indigenous environmental education programs offer learning, while also serving as vehicles for cultural resurgence and perpetuation. Like any educational program these initiatives require evaluation to improve their quality, assess progress and meet obligations to funders. However, evaluation tools must be tailored to such programs, which tend to be values based, holistic, and often focused on group, family and community empowerment rather than individual student learning. At the same time, evaluation tools developed specifically for indigenous education programs may be difficult to compare across programs. In this case, we investigate how the logic model, an established and widely used western evaluation tool, can be adapted and applied effectively to evaluate a place based Native Hawaiian education program, Waipā Foundation's summer environmental program aimed at youth entitled Mai uka a i kai (from the uplands to the sea). In a pilot evaluation of Waipa Mai uka a I kai environmental summer program found that short-and medium-term outcomes associated with the program's logic model were generally met, particularly if qualitative assessment tools were used. The use of quantitative evaluation tools and incorporating long-term outcomes requires much more involvement from program staff, participants and the broader community. These findings offer lessons for application of logic models, as well evaluation more broadly, within indigenous education contexts.