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Over the past year, I’ve been diving deep into concepts around reparations — in a course I took about reparations for slavery in the US (check out my 5 Key Takeaways!), as well as in my dissertation work where I’m looking at reparations as a new way to frame international development and humanitarian aid.

In my work as an evaluator and researcher, I’ve been asking myself — what can we learn from reparations and anti-racism work that can shift our evaluation practice towards equity and justice? I’ve come up with 3 things we need to do better:

1. Name and talk (and write) about race and coloniality. Too often, our work as evaluators does not meaningfully examine histories and contemporary contexts of slavery, White supremacy, and colonialism/imperialism. If we are going to contribute meaningfully to social change, we need to explore how these issues affect opportunities and outcomes for people of marginalized identities. We need to include this analysis in our presentation of findings. We need to frame our work as seeking to shift the Racial Contract.
2. Critically examine the cultural, political, and economic contexts of our work. The current neoliberal capitalist system in the US and globally was built on the conquest and exploitation of Black and Brown folks. And it relies on continued injustice to survive. If we are to contribute to social change, as evaluators we need to interrogate the unjust systems — the power hierarchies, mental models, and relationships — in which the policies and practices we aim to shift are embedded.
3. Problematize our own role in maintaining the status quo. We all live in a White supremacist, imperialist, capitalist society. Even if we actively work to dismantle it, our mere existence and participation in it upholds it. We are what Michael Rothberg calls ‘implicated subjects’.As evaluators, we need to continuously examine how our practices in our organizations, our work, and in relationship with communities may be contributing to injustice. We need to practice reflexivity to move towards a constructive complicity.

There are many other ways evaluators are examining their complicity in White supremacist systems. Leave a comment to share your thoughts, or follow our blog for more insights in how this shapes our evaluation work!

Kayla Boisvert is an artist and researcher for advocacy initiatives that promote social justice at Innovation Network. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her husband and silly dog-monster. She is often found running trails and climbing mountains where she lives and around the world.

What Reparations Taught Me as an Evaluator was originally published in InnovationNetwork on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Written by Rebecca Perlmutter, Innovation Network Senior Associate

Inspired by our friends at CEI, who begin every January with two weeks of independent study, we decided to pilot a similar week for the first of week of January. The purpose of the week was to seek inspiration and insight, and we intentionally did not create any rules or guidelines about how to use our time.

What did we do?

We’d like to share some of the resources related to learning, evaluation, and social change that resonated most with us during our week. We hope you also find some inspiration in these resources, or are motivated to look further into similar topics!

Two of us read books on emergent strategy by adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy and Holding Change.

• Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. This book is an introduction to emergent strategy, which is about “how we shape and generate complex systems and patterns through our own relatively simple interactions.” We found in it a helpful reminder that we are trying new things in order to create a better world, and trying new things requires that we slow down as we feel the change and learn what works for us.
• Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation. This book provides ideas for incorporating emergent strategy practices and principles in your facilitation and mediation practice and also includes essays from Black feminist facilitators. We are always seeking to deepen our wisdom as facilitators, and this book helped remind us of the importance of using facilitation to build relationships, help groups surface answers, and center each person’s humanity.

Two colleagues explored different ways to tell visual stories. One took a creative data visualization course with Gabrielle Merite (Gabrielle also offers some free resources on her website) and one took a course on non-fiction comics for writers.

• The data viz course combines digital illustration and collage techniques to help you create engaging data visualizations.
• The comics course demonstrates how to transform research, interviews, and articles into graphic storytelling.

We found the book Advocacy and Policy Change Evaluation by Annette L. Gardner and Claire D. Brindis to be a great way to refresh our understanding of the different approaches to the complex world of advocacy evaluation.

• This book provides an overview of the concepts, designs, methods, and tools for conducting advocacy and policy change evaluations. It is informed by a large-scale survey of evaluators working in the field and includes case studies that provide concrete examples of advocacy and policy change evaluations.

So what did we learn?

This was a successful experiment for us! Beyond learning about the different topics in the books we read or courses we took, we had some broader reflections about what an inspiration week meant for us individually and as an organization. These reflections may be useful if you are considering holding your own inspiration week.

• The openness of the week was empowering and enabled each of us to best choose what we needed for personal development and to prepare for the year ahead.
• It was important to be intentional about how we used our time. We all tried to use the time for things we may not have space for during busier periods of the year. For a lot of us, this meant spending time with longer materials, like an entire book. At the same time, having a mix of learning options was key, which for us included videos and courses in addition to books.
• Doing this right after our end of year break was the perfect way to ease into the new year, before client meetings and other commitments crowded our calendars.
• Four days were both too slow and too fast! We realized it was important to create space to process what we were learning, rather than just moving on to consuming the next product.

Have you ever had an independent study or inspiration week at your organization? How did you spend your time and what did you learn? Let us know your thoughts, and any recommendations you might have for our approach, in the comments!

Inspiration Week Highlights was originally published in InnovationNetwork on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.