Date: Sunday, April 19, 2026
Hello everyone, I’m Rupu Gupta, Senior Scientist for Social Sciences and Evaluation at the Hudson River Foundation, and Program Chair for the Environmental Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group (EPE TIG).
It’s that time of the year, when our TIG enthusiastically celebrates Earth Week. We do so by showcasing how our members advance deeply intertwined social-ecological goals through their evaluation expertise. Whether or not this description of our TIG’s work surprises you, I invite you to peruse our week of posts that reinforce and champion this focus.
To get us started, I’m sharing our TIG leadership’s efforts this past year to surface and deepen the connections between environmental and people-centered evaluation. This happened in parallel to our work to better understand the interests, expertise, and needs of our members, to thoughtfully build a community.
A member survey revealed strong interest in a community of practice for knowledge exchange. Importantly, members were most interested in learning about topics closely connected to human welfare (e.g., climate change, environmental health, agriculture) or systems that impact people and are shaped by them in mutually reinforcing ways (e.g., sustainability, environmental policy). A few members even reminded us that our TIG’s name needed to better represent the role of people and societal systems influencing environmental outcomes.
Our monthly meetings provided a venue to spotlight members’ evaluation expertise. Their stories reflected the themes from the survey, and included foci such as:
We co-hosted meetings with other TIGs to highlight how our work overlapped around topical interest foci. The discussions focused on:
The themes we hear from our members and experience through our own work are consistent and increasingly more relevant as our societal and environmental challenges exacerbate. To meaningfully tackle these crises, we need to:
1. Understand the complex experiences of the people impacted and those shaping solutions.
Individual motivations, capacities, and barriers as well as group hierarchies and power structures underpin the reality of decision making, with consequences (both positive and negative) for environmental spaces and the people connected to them.
2. Connect impacts on environmental systems with that of other systems that center societal welfare.
Linking environmental shifts to public health, education, economics, policy, governance, among others enables an authentic understanding of the levers that result in authentic change.
3. Adopt creative evaluation methodologies that expand the approaches, questions, outcomes, and impacts we anticipate.
Our posts this week reflect these themes and describe myriad contexts in which our environmental evaluator colleagues apply them. As our TIG continues to expand the ways we embody evaluation to impact social and ecological goals, we extend an invitation to everyone to join us in this journey.
Register here to join a future meeting!
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Environmental Program Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Environmental Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our EPE TIG members. 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.