Date: Friday, October 10, 2025
Hi there, AEA365! I’m Natalie Joseph, MPH, CPH, a current doctoral student and alumna of the LEEAD Program (Cohort 5). I serve as a Community of Practice Evaluation Consultant at Mirror Group LLC and am the Founder of Dots & Data LLC. My work focuses on leveraging mixed methods and using a multidimensional thinking lens to enhance data analysis, visualization, and evaluation processes.
In these unprecedented times affecting arts and evaluation, I’ve been reflecting on what matters most in our work. This reflection deepened when, in 2024, I participated in an evaluation of a multi-million dollar initiative supporting Black-led organizations that challenged traditional grantmaking by providing unrestricted funding paired with genuine recognition.
Through Go Along visits and interviews with participating organizations, we discovered something remarkable: when given genuine freedom, these organizations didn’t simply expand traditional arts programming. Instead, they transformed into “community anchors,” sustaining cultural legacies while fostering spaces for belonging and intergenerational connection.
Ultimately, this transformation illuminated a fundamental distinction that traditional evaluation methods often miss. While arts programming centers on artistic creation and presentation, cultural work encompasses something far broader: preserving and transmitting community heritage, wisdom, and identity across generations. As organizations navigated pandemic challenges with newfound freedom, they naturally gravitated toward addressing what their communities needed most. Traditional metrics focused on attendance or artistic productions would have completely missed the profound community-building and cultural preservation that actually occurred.
This experience taught me that when evaluating unrestricted funding, we must examine what organizations actually accomplished rather than assuming they followed traditional programming models. We learned that cultural organizations often prioritize heritage preservation and community anchoring when given genuine freedom, and our evaluation methods need to capture and honor this work.
Additionally, the initiative included multiple opportunities for grantees to engage through subcommittees and working groups, creating network effects that extended beyond individual organizational outcomes. In-person Go Along visits proved essential, allowing grantees to show us their communities through their own perspectives, revealing how recognition and funding enabled work connecting to place and community in ways that traditional virtual interviews never could have captured.
Furthermore, the recognition component proved equally transformative. Many organizations with ten or more years of service had operated without formal acknowledgment, and this validation enabled them to leverage their new status for additional funding and partnerships. Organizations used unrestricted funding to transition long-term volunteers to full-time staff with benefits, pay founders salaries for the first time, and establish operational structures that supported their expanded role as community anchors.
For future retrospective work, develop approaches that center how organizations define their own success rather than measuring against funder assumptions. When organizations receive unrestricted funding and recognition, create space for them to articulate the full scope of their community contributions and cultural preservation work.
Moreover, use methods that can capture the distinction between arts programming and cultural work, recognizing that the latter often becomes the priority when organizations have genuine freedom to respond to community needs.
When we create conditions that honor the wisdom communities already possess, the results often exceed our most optimistic expectations.
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