LEEAD Scholars Week: Cultivating Healing Ground: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Equitable Evaluation by Tasha Parker

Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024

I’m Dr. Tasha Parker, a LEEAD Cohort 5 Alumni (Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity) and founder of the Institute of Development. My journey through these fields has taught me that evaluation, like tending a garden, requires deep understanding of both the soil beneath our feet and the ecosystems of care we hope to nurture.

As both a Community Psychologist and Clinical Social Worker, I’ve learned that our communities’ stories are like seeds planted in soil that holds generations of history, trauma, and resilience. This unique perspective has shaped my approach to evaluation – not as a mere data collection exercise, but as an opportunity to cultivate spaces where healing and transformation can flourish.

Hot Tips for Selecting Your Tools

Traditional evaluation tools are like inherited gardening tools – they may have served a purpose in their time, but might need adaptation for today’s needs. The myth of evaluator neutrality is like expecting a garden to thrive without acknowledging the gardener’s influence. Instead, we must:

1. Know Your Soil: Before you plant anything, understand the ground you’re working with. What historical traumas have shaped this community? How have previous evaluations potentially caused harm? This isn’t just background research – it’s crucial context that shapes everything that follows.
2. Challenge Traditional Tools: Just because something’s always been done a certain way doesn’t mean it’s serving our communities. Let’s be real – traditional evaluation approaches often perpetuate harm under the guise of “objectivity.” None of us is free from bias. Instead of pretending to be neutral, let’s acknowledge our positionality and use our lived experiences as strengths in building authentic connections.

Nurturing Growth: Creating Spaces for Healing

A garden needs more than just seeds and soil – it needs consistent care, protection, and space to flourish. In evaluation, this translates to:

• Creating safe spaces for communities to share their stories, like providing shelter for tender shoots
• Valuing community ways of knowing and recognize your expertise doesn’t make you an expert
• Building in moments for rest and reflection, like allowing fallow periods in a garden
• Ensuring our data collection methods feed back into community strength, like composting returns nutrients to the soil
• Protecting against retraumatization, like sheltering plants from harsh conditions

Lessons Learned

As emerging evaluators, we’re not just maintaining existing gardens – we’re helping to cultivate new approaches to growth.  This means:

• Resilience isn’t just about surviving difficult conditions – it’s about creating environments where communities can thrive
• Like diverse plantings strengthen a garden, multiple ways of knowing enrich our evaluation practice
• Just as gardens need consistent attention, building trust with communities requires sustained commitment
• The fruits of our evaluation work should nourish the communities that grew them
• Make no excuses in our pursuit of advancing equity and healing through our work

Rad Resources or Seeds for Future Growth

• Ubuntu’s work on equity, justice, and liberation-centered evaluation
• Chicago Beyond’s “Why Am I Always Being Researched?”
• Resources from the Equitable Evaluation Initiative
• AEA’s Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation

Growing Together

Like any garden, the work of transformative evaluation thrives with many hands. This work isn’t meant to be done alone. Share your experiences, challenges, and successes in cultivating trauma-informed evaluation approaches. What seeds are you planting? What growth are you witnessing? Together, we can nurture evaluation practices that honor our communities’ wisdom, acknowledge their trauma, and contribute to collective healing.

This week’s contributions come from members of AEA’s Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity (LEEAD) program. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.