We are Amani Austin, founder of Austin Advocates With, LLC, and Katie Winters, principal consultant for Insight for Action, LLC. Amani is most proud of her lived experience as a black woman and a first-generation college graduate using the wisdom of her lived experience and cultural wealth to shape her approach to evaluation and facilitation. Katie is a white woman whose first decade doing evaluation was grounded in the orthodoxies that culturally responsive and equitable evaluation seek to dismantle. She has been unraveling and unlearning ever since.
We’ve been partnering to provide coaching to internal evaluation teams to unlearn white supremacy culture (WSC) and do more equitable evaluation. Great effort and intentionality have gone into building our ways of working together, which also serves to leverage our strengths and sustain our engagement in this important, but emotionally demanding work. In this post we share highlights from our approach.
Strategies to Create Synergy
Go slow to go fast: Our first series of meetings were not project-related. We had already seen each other’s resumes and signed a contract to work together so we knew one another’s professional skill sets. We wanted to learn more about one another’s values, quirks, and how we were unlearning white supremacy culture in our practice and our lives. We went on walks in Ladds Addition, a historic SE Portland neighborhood, to help us be physically present during our exchanges. Our conversations built a foundation of frank and heart-centered relating that we’ve carried through our client engagements. This essential groundwork has enabled us to maintain our alignment as we support our clients to build anti-supremacist evaluation capacity.
Identify where power, energy, and skills sit and readjust as needed: At this point, we’ve learned where each of us shines and where we experience burden in the work. We assign our project roles with these in mind, which may sound obvious, but is important to name from an equity lens. We distribute (and redistribute) the load to honor one another and as a means to account for inequity in the burden that WSC levels in our lives. For example, Amani typically takes the lead when facilitating coaching sessions, because we’ve found it is her voice that our clients really need to hear. As a white woman unlearning WSC, Katie models to other white folx how to engage humbly in courageous conversations. She also intermittently drops into the role of facilitator to give Amani a break from the labor of talking about racism.
Engage in independent (un)learning: On our own, we both are continually learning and reflecting on how to shift our lives and evaluation practices to be more embodied and effective in this work. Amani has been participating in Resma’s Somatic Abolitionism cohort to deepen her practice in embodiment as it pertains to liberation work and engaging in anti-racist learning through the Othering and Belonging Institute. Katie is part of a white women’s affinity group that gathers monthly to discuss how WSC is showing up in their lives and collaborate on emancipatory actions. These learnings make more space for curious co-creation and a readiness to try evaluation differently.
Rad Resources
In our first collaborative contract with Ecotrust, one of our coaching sessions built from a previous AEA365 blog post: Decolonizing Evaluation Week: Questioning How White Supremacy Shows Up in Our Work by Lauren Beriont that was adapted from the work of the Emergence Collective.
Continuously interrogating the characteristics of WSC has proven incredibly useful to evolving our work, both personal and professional, toward greater equity and justice.
We’re looking forward to the fall and the Evaluation 2024 conference with our colleagues in the Local Arrangements Working Group (LAWG). 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 contribute to AEA365? Review the contribution guidelines and send your draft post to AEA365@eval.org. 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.