Evaluation in the Service of Racial Equity: Getting Practical

Led by the Washington Evaluators, July 29, 12:00-1:30pm

Many of us in the evaluation profession are committed to using our practice to support racial equity and social justice. Concepts, frameworks, and terms such as multicultural validity, culturally responsive evaluation, transformative evaluation, equitable evaluation, and more, have excited us. In recent years, some foundations have started to add a requirement for adhering to equitable evaluation principles in their RFPs. Even if we agree on the importance of the principles, many of us wrestle with how to make them concrete and put them into everyday practice.

Transforming our practice to support racial equity is not something we can do with a framework, a tool, or a checklist, and it certainly won’t happen overnight. Conducting evaluation in service of racial equity is a practice and like any practice, it requires us to continuously learn, hone, and improve our knowledge and skills. This workshop will focus on one aspect of the practice—how to use a systems lens in our practice to help our clients dissect and diagnose the symptoms, structures, and linkages that perpetuate racial inequity for communities that have been historically marginalized and continue to be marginalized today. We will use hands-on exercises to help workshop participants engage with this lens.

There are no easy answers when it comes to evaluation in the service of racial equity. This workshop will not provide you with a neatly packaged set of solutions. Instead, it will probably raise more questions and challenges, which is inevitable because we are dealing with implicit biases that have seeped into our scientific training for generations. This has in turn created an ecosystem of funders, evaluation practitioners, and evaluation consumers that unintentionally perpetuate the status quo. Join Drs. Kien Lee and Brandi Gilbert in a process—albeit brief and virtual—to strengthen our collective practice of evaluation in service of racial equity as we challenge and help each other to get better at it.

This event is open to WE members.

If you have questions about this event, please email programs@washingtonevaluators.org.