International Women’s Day is March 8th and, in celebration, we are sharing blogs from the AEA365 archive that are about women and/or women’s issues in evaluation. Happy reading, and happy International Women’s Day!
-Liz DiLuzio, Lead Curator
Hi! My name is Monique Liston, Chief Strategic Officer at Ubuntu Research and Evaluation. I am a race liberation strategist and evaluator based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
As 2016 came to a close, I found myself at a professional crossroads, nearing the end of writing my dissertation and reevaluating my work prospects. I reached out to several friends and colleagues who have always held my professional identity in high regard to contemplate my next moves. Many people offered ideas of positions within institutions such as universities, foundations, or nonprofits that would be opening soon or could possibly be created to nurture my skill set.
However, the timing for these opportunities did not coincide with my needs. I took a leap of faith and decided to build my own consulting firm. I decided that I wanted to build a space for research and evaluation that celebrated Black Women as having unique professional skillsets, being knowledge creators celebrating what Patricia Hill Collins termed “Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology”, and deserving to be compensated fully for what they bring to the table. Here are three hot tips for supporting a space for Black women to direct and design evaluation.
Hot Tips:
- Meditate on Dr. Vincent J. Harding’s The Vocation of the Black Scholar. There are many Black women who have written about the unique contributions that Black scholars provide to scholastic endeavors. However, Harding’s article very clears out the tensions that reside between Black liberation ideologies and the work of scholars in the academy. As evaluators, we have a responsibility to consider how we can uplift beloved community through our evaluation practice.
- Embed written reflection during every formal opportunity.We know that Black women’s voices are often marginalized in professional spaces. Joan Morgan explains one of the reasons this happens, particularly around practitioners is because of the “superwoman complex”. Black women, being too busy doing, and not spending enough time processing their work through written reflection. To combat that, all of us at Ubuntu are responsible for writing monthly for our blog.
- Build intentional spaces for decompression.Last, but of course, not least, we spend considerable time in our meeting spaces for decompression. We do verbal, written, and artistic check-ins to support one another. We allow others to witness our intentionality around decompressing white supremacist thinking, microaggressions, and misogynoir. We develop a short decompression guide — for laughs — but it holds significant truths to the way we work at Ubuntu!
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.