Taking a breath as we enter the fifth season and fall conferences
Traditional Chinese medicine recognizes late summer as the fifth season. It acts as a bridge between the active outward energy of summer into reflection and harvesting in the cooling autumn. Data+Soul plans to do this by taking a week-long team break in early September, followed by a robust fall conference season where we look forward to sharing, connecting, and harvesting lessons with you all. Most of our conference sessions are centered around tools and practice that have grounded our work and been transformative for us as a team. Here are some of the conversations we're eager to have:
How do our identities, experiences, and positionality shape our evaluation practice?
Foundational workshops: the cornerstones of our work remain the same. We continue to deliver our foundational workshops for evaluators and public health professionals asking: What does it take to work with data in ways that are equitable, transformative, and full of soul? Whether this is a new or old question for you, the workshops create space for us to examine the assumptions that are baked into the work we do with data and share practices that help us acknowledge context, systems, and power in service of more robust research/evaluative work. Pre-registration required:
American Public Health Association Learning Institute | October 31 | San Antonio, TX
American Evaluation Association Pre-conference workshop | November 18 | Charlotte, NC
Whose stories are our planning tools built to tell?
Story+Data Map as a tool for person-centered program planning and evaluation design. Since publishing it last year, we've had many wonderful conversations with you all - both to answer questions about its mechanics and to explore how the tool can shift us towards person-centered program planning, evaluation design, and needs assessment. In October, we'll share what we've learned by hosting a symposium about the Story+Data Map at the CREA conference, a poster session at Vital Village Network's annual summit here in Boston, and a detailed demonstration at the annual AEA conference.
Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment | October 8 | Chicago, IL
American Evaluation Association | November 18-20 | Charlotte, NC
Vital Village’s National Community Leadership Summit | October 22-23 | Boston, MA
And what happens when the tools and commitments above get tested against the real complexity of our clients’ world?
Walking alongside our partners. We've been doing a lot of evaluation capacity building work via coaching and technical assistance this year, at very different scales. We're excited to bring some of our case studies to life as we show up with our partners and share what's possible when the foundations of our practice are tested at scale and we build lasting capacity with our clients. These sessions carry our lessons learned about what it takes to center communities and, whether the goal is one organization's internal learning or a coalition's collective power, shift evaluative/data work from something done for reporting to something that fuels learning, strategy, and action.
Vital Village's National Community Leadership Summit, with Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center | Evaluation in Two Languages: Today's Reflections on 50 Years of Supporting Greater Boston's AAPI Communities | October 22-23 | Boston, MA
North American Association for Environmental Education, with Earth Force | Building Evaluation Capacity Through Coaching: A Model for Innovation | October 8 | Portland, OR
Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment, with Reclaim Roxbury, Consensus Building Institute & the Roxbury Collective for Housing Affordability | Building With, Not For: Data Use, Community Power, and Partnership for Grassroots Movement-Building | October 6-9 | Chicago, IL
Building capacity as a field. Several of our team members have long been a part of broader field-building efforts within specific regions or professional communities. Currently, Min and Evan hold leadership positions with the Greater Boston Evaluation Network and Environmental Program Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group at AEA, respectively. They will be organizing local events at AEA within these roles. Evan and Bobbie D, alongside several long-time collaborators, will share about their work running Evaluation Clinics - table discussions where evaluators and practitioners build relationships while working through real evaluation challenges.
North American Association for Environmental Education | Building Relationships to Build Evaluation Capacity at State-Level Evaluation Clinics | October 8 | Portland, OR
American Evaluation Association | Building Capacity through Local Evaluation Clinics: A Cross-Sector Toolkit and Model from Environmental Education | November 18-20 | Charlotte, NC
How can we right-size our evaluation efforts given limited resources?
Right-sizing evaluation, closer to home. Finally, we’re leading two local or virtual sessions for nonprofit leaders and staff juggling reporting, fundraising, and programs - often without a dedicated evaluation function - who want practical ways to match evaluation effort to capacity.
Data+Soul Virtual Learning Series | Meaningful Measurement: Rigorous, Qualitative-First Data Collection Approaches for Demonstrating Impact | September 30 | Virtual, free and open to all
Massachusetts Council of Nonprofits (MCN) Annual Conference | Right-Sizing Evaluation: Using Data to Learn, Adapt, and Inform Strategy | October 21 | Worcester, MA
Every session this fall is structured to end in a question or an exchange so we can continue to build our own learning and generate knowledge together. Join us!