Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
I’m Ali Berlinski. I work as an evaluation consultant for a White-woman-owned firm in Oakland, CA, where we work with mission driven organizations, helping them use data to tell their stories. Before working in evaluation, I was an educator for over a decade, trained in Restorative Practices. Restorative Practices shifted not only my practice as an educator, but also how I approach all aspects of my life, including my work as an evaluation consultant. In this post, I’ll discuss how I use components of Restorative Practices to promote equity in my evaluation practice.
First, Restorative Practices taught me how to reflect deeply on power dynamics, identities, and relationships. As a woman of color operating in many white dominated spaces, I feel my identity acutely. I frequently navigate power disparities since my work often entails uplifting or curating the experiences of people of color for mainly White-led organizations. Thus, I am intentional to be self-reflective when interpreting data. When I reflect on an interview, focus group, or even a client interaction, I ask myself:
How does my identity or lived experience influence my understanding of what I’ve heard?
Is there any piece of information I’m giving more weight to?
Conversely, is there any information I’m not giving enough weight to?
Perhaps counterintuitively, acknowledging my own bias allows me to be more equitable, by helping me to make the unseen seen so I can take steps to address it. None of us are without bias. Consequently, none of our findings are truly objective or apolitical. All of it adds to a narrative. On my team, we routinely engage in equity checks to highlight biases with the explicit understanding that we all are influenced by our lived experiences.
Second, my training in Restorative Practices taught me how to listen deeply. Both qualitative methods and Restorative Practices rely on active listening. Using active listening, evaluators paraphrase what they’ve heard and ask questions like, “Am I missing anything?” Listening deeply allows us to make the people on the other side of the conversation feel seen and heard so they feel like an important part of a story and not simply another data point. It humanizes the experience for both the evaluator and the participant, which in turn can create room for more equity and facilitates deeper meaning making.
As evaluators we are tasked with listening deeply so that we can understand deeply and contribute to a narrative that restores rather than harms. Our words, our findings, hold weight and so they hold power. For this reason, it is important that we make sure we reflect on our positionality so we can work to amplify the voices of those who have less access to power, but whose stories are an important part of the narrative.
Hot Tip
Consider ways to routinely build in reflection points in your evaluation where you reflect on your positionality and lived experiences, individually or as a project group. Name your related experiences or gaps in knowledge. Then consider if you need to readjust your approach. Finally, give yourself grace if you notice a bias and try to see how you can challenge your bias.
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. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.