Community First Development is a unique First Nations’ organisation with diverse knowledge and expertise.

We are actively involved in First Nations’ communities; and established as a thought leader in First Nations’ community and economic development, research, monitoring and evaluation. We believe there are valuable connections between these streams of work. 

Our research focuses on First Nations-driven, Participatory Action Research that results in meaningful and timely change for our people and communities. Our research activities are built into our community development activities and are conducted in-house, ensuring that learnings can be quickly acted on and used to strengthen our community development practice.

first nations’ research and evaluation

Reports

Case Studies

Practice Resources

We have designed an inclusive, culturally safe and relevant monitoring and evaluation approach to contribute to better outcomes for First Nations peoples. This approach is embedded into all of our community development activities.

Our journey to continually strengthen our monitoring, evaluation and learning provides a model that demonstrates the benefits of investing in evaluation capability.

We have found it reinforces First Nations' peoples’ rights to self-determination through leading the evaluation design and delivery; it increases transparency to program participants; it strengthens local governance structures; and enables immediate lessons from evaluations to be incorporated in program delivery. In addition, it ensures that research capacity is strengthened internally among our team and within the communities working with us through evaluation, reflection and specific research projects.

We believe our evidence based approach and over 20 years of experience working with and for First Nations’ people places us in a solid position to influence the design, delivery and evaluation of policies and programs that will impact them. 

FELLOW