Date: Sunday, December 15, 2024
Hi, I am Mindelyn Anderson, Ph.D., Founder + CEO of Mirror Group LLC, where your data is made meaningful, accessible, and actionable. And hi, I am Kimberly Harris, Ph.D., Founder and Principal Evaluator and Researcher at Educa Consulting, Inc. where we are unapologetically collectivist because we understand people are at the center of our why.
Now, we are not delusional. We know that no one would call us emergent evaluators at this stage in our careers. However, we vividly recall entering this space, navigating through its terminology, frameworks, templates, and approaches with friends and colleagues in the work who poured into us, and we now enjoy the opportunity to pour into others. So we are writing today to discuss the importance of honing evaluative practice that welcomes emerging evaluators with their varied journeys to evaluation.
Consider working with community evaluators–these are community members who bring a lens of knowing you can’t get any place else. At Educa Consulting upon initiating any engagement we regularly solicit and seek the wisdom of community members, train them in the fundamentals of evaluation practice so they can not only partner with us in the work we do for the evaluand, but they can utilize those skills in other spaces beyond our engagement. And at Mirror Group, we have created and hosted fellows over the years who have gone on to form their own independent practices, join other consulting organizations, and contribute to advancing emergent and innovative evaluation practice across the sectors and communities that they touch.
No helicoptering in, unless invited by community. At Mirror Group we shout out our Baltimore people who taught me (Mindelyn) this lesson back in 2017 when I was invited by a foundation to join the project as a Documentarian, or developmental evaluator, to walk along with community advisors, funders, and their consultant partners in what was then innovative community-led, foundation-funded, solutions-oriented work to ensure research remains accessible to local residents. As an external evaluator, I interviewed with community leaders, yielded tough questions, and was extended the opportunity to show (not tell) my posture in the work. After a few months, I was invited to companion community throughout the 5-year project, a journey that offered many opportunities for bidirectional learning and capacity building that led to an expanded view, understanding, and practice of community evaluation.
Nurture an aligned community of practitioners. The Liberatory Learning Circle helmed by Dr. Mama Sister Birth Doula Geri Lynn Peak (aka Dr. All The Things) is such a robust and welcoming space, fertile with imagination, contribution, and co-laboring thought and action partnership to nourish emerging evaluators. In this space we evolve our practice among colleagues and friends in the work who are advancing human-centered design, inquiry, and virtues-infused applications evaluation across national and international settings.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We transform deeply entrenched systems that do not serve us when we lock in arms, aligned and interconnected, to build collective new futures. Emerging evaluators and their colleagues, allies, and mentors, are doing just this in our field of evaluation. We are grateful to be in community with those leading the new vanguard. Check out UBUNTU Research & Evaluation, BECOME, Lift Every Voice, and Liminal Spaces Lab.
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.