Upon recent events, including the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Riah Milton, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Selena Reyes-Hernandez, Rayshard Brooks and countless others who lost their lives to police violence, racism, or hatred, we had to ask ourselves does this work go far enough to change the current inequities in our region? We were honest with ourselves and agreed the answer is no.
As mentioned in our previous blog, the RISE Partnership has committed to being more explicit about equity and evaluation in all of our work. To achieve this, we are:
- Educating and engaging RISE Partnership staff and consultants through content knowledge and group discussions;
- Understanding where and how DEI is valued and expressed from the perspective our RISE nonprofit grantees;
- Highlighting equity in evaluation in the RISE group learning sessions;
- Creating common language and terms that include identifying cultural context and equity in evaluation;
- Partnering with Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia to host the session, Equity-centered Evaluation Design: How Funders Can Assess Progress in Partnership with Nonprofits and Community. View part one of this webinar series here. We look forward to conducting part two in the future.
- Learning from other initiatives with similar goals
And more recently, our upcoming article on Data Equity and Racial Justice.
While our focus has been to center equity in our work, we now realize that we need to go much deeper to address the root causes of the pervasive system we are situated in: RACISM. Our work should be centered in addressing and dismantling racism in evaluation, not just centering equity, which clouds the central issue at stake.
Racism is a determinant of health and wellbeing in our society; therefore, the programs we offer often perpetuate the negative differences we see in outcomes. We will be examining what we can do to focus explicitly on racism. For example, should we consult with organizations to measure race related events for beneficiaries and staff to better address the lived experience of the people we work with?
In the coming months, we will be identifying new ways we can explicitly talk about racism and how we will modify our trainings and materials to promote anti-racist evaluation practices.
We welcome you to join us on this journey – to share knowledge and to challenge us to do more and to do better. If now is not the time to do this, when will it be?
We are accountable to you. Please check back with us for updates on our website or contact our vice president of learning and community impact, Samantha Matlin, at smatlin@scattergoodfoundation.org to continue the conversation about this work.