Hello! I am Rajib Nandi, a researcher and evaluator working primarily in South Asia, with a focus on evaluation capacity development. Here, I reflect on the evaluation competencies of emotional intelligence and resilience. I have identified these within a core set of eleven competencies in the forthcoming article ‘Rethinking Evaluation Competencies for the Transformational Imperative,’ part of a special issue of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation (JMDE) led by the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc)

Hi! We are the Use and Influence TIG Leadership team – Charmagne Campbell-Patton, Jennifer Villalobos, Justin Christy, Minji Cho, Moira Ragan, and Seth Tucker.

Hi! We are Valerie Malzer, Katie Brendli Brown, Jen Brooks, and Leslie Shaw, extension faculty at Cornell University’s K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Institute on Employment and Disability. We serve as external evaluators of the Inclusive Career Advancement Program (ICAP), an Oregon Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR) initiative funded by the Rehabilitation Services Administration.

Hello, fellow evaluators! We are Janet Arogundade and Donather Magabe, Ph.D. students in Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A course on evaluation and public policy prompted us to reconsider how evaluation creates public value and who benefits from it.

My name is Karen Kirkhart, and I am now an elder in the evaluation profession. I was active in both Evaluation Network and the Evaluation Research Society before they merged to form AEA. I have been active in AEA since its founding, and I served as President in 1994. I have spent decades pondering two related topics in evaluation: validity and influence. Creating accurate, trustworthy understandings, and taking action to make a difference. We evaluators have always wanted to use our craft to inform decisions and advance social betterment. In fact, the Use TIG was one of the original topical interest groups of the AEA, and the wisdom our TIG has never been more relevant than now.

Good morning and happy Tuesday! I am Doris Espelien, professional nerd (like you) and founder of Bricolage Consulting in St. Paul, MN. I’ve had the privilege of learning from and working with people who allowed me to pursue this work my own way, and I’m excited to share with you some insights that have come along the way.

My name is Élyse McCall-Thomas, PhD Candidate at the University of Ottawa. In this post, I reflect on how working outside traditional timelines and closely with programs can facilitate the use of evaluation findings.

We are Michael Quinn Patton and Charmagne E. Campbell-Patton, from Utilization-Focused Evaluation, here to welcome you to Use & Influence of Evaluation week here at AEA365. We are a father-daughter team with more than 65 years of experience in evaluation consulting across a range of contexts.

Hello, AEA365 readers! We are evaluators and technical assistance (TA) practitioners who have spent much of our careers helping organizations put evidence-based programs and practices into action. Over the years, we’ve come to see evaluation and TA not as separate activities, but as deeply interconnected practices: good TA requires us to continually collect evidence, learn from implementation, and adapt.

Hello, I am Titilayo Ogunbambi, a community psychologist and evaluator affiliated with National Louis University, Chicago, Illinois. I spent the past decade supporting survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV), engaging in prevention efforts, and evaluating social, cultural, and relational drivers influencing IPV across different contexts. More recently, I had the opportunity to examine the challenges and barriers impeding IPV help-seeking and the use of available formal services among African immigrant women in the United States by interviewing frontline service providers, advocates, and coalition members at the United African Organization in Chicago. The findings inform a culturally responsive framework for co-creating IPV services (See Figure 1 below) and provide evaluators with practical ways to understand reasons why existing systems fall short of addressing IPV and what is needed to design programs that genuinely meet the needs of vulnerable communities.