Emily Haroz
Amanda Harris
The Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health (JHCIH) leads a global project including partners across four sites: First Nations Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia, Canada. Funded by the LEGO Foundation, the collective’s goal is to “build a world of play” for Indigenous families through offering culture-centered home-visiting services and co-designing Indigenous playspaces. Using Indigenous evaluation approaches, we co-designed an evaluation plan that aims to tell a cohesive story of the project while honoring the principles for Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) and unique methodologies from the diverse contexts. Representatives from each site shared their guiding framework: the CARE Principles (US), the First Nations Principles of OCAP (Canada), Maiam Nayri Wingara Principles (Australia), and the Te Mana Raraunga Framework (Aotearoa). Facilitated by our working group for IDS, data governance, and ethics, we collaboratively harmonized shared principles and developed a unified approach that guides the project’s data governance and evaluation. Like tributaries flowing together, this process enabled each country team to maintain a distinct stream that carries its own Indigenous ways while feeding into a shared IDS framework and evaluation. JHCIH hosts the confluence, the gathering place where these distinct streams meet. We will share stories and learnings from the project thus far, describing the process of braiding together wisdom from many relatives, and how we have created confluence points where the streams join to enable partners and communities to derive benefit from their data and tell the story of how Indigenous families can thrive.