Being Culturally Responsive in Evaluation Practice

Led by the Washington Evaluators, June 3, 12:00-1:30pm

Washington Evaluators is honored to have Dr. Wanda Casillas present a workshop on Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE). CRE is often described as a way of thinking, a stance taken, or an emerging approach to evaluation that centers culture and context in all steps of an evaluation process. Though critics of CRE claim it does not follow traditional step-wise protocols, it provides a timely and necessary foundation for critically informing best practices in evaluation design, implementation, and utilization.

Taking the broad approach that “culture” describes a shared set of values, principles, practices, behaviors, and tools among groups of individuals, we will review the ways in which stakeholders and evaluators, programs, and evaluations are culturally- and contextually-situated and explore what this assertion means for evaluation practice. We’ll confront complex topics such as the nature of intersecting cultural spheres on evaluation components and the capacity and role of evaluations to address these. In this session, we will engage with a core set of CRE principles that can be married with existing toolkits in order to create robust, thoughtful, and valid evaluation designs to optimize effectiveness for evaluands and utilization of evaluation findings.