Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
¡Hola! I’m Bijan Kimiagar, founder and principal of AEQUA Strategies, and a proud member of the Youth Focused Evaluation Topic Interest Group. At the 2025 American Evaluation Association conference in Kansas City, I had the privilege of facilitating a skill-building workshop on evaluating power dynamics in group decision-making. What follows are some reflections I’m bringing back from that experience.
Our field spends a great deal of energy evaluating systems, programs, policies, organizations; but we don’t interrogate interpersonal power dynamics nearly enough. Who speaks in a meeting, whose ideas get credited, who gets to vote and who merely gets consulted. Too often these dynamics are taken for granted. Yet they shape outcomes. If we want to understand how systems work, especially how organizations work, we have to be willing to look critically at how we organize and govern ourselves.
At the skill-building workshop in Kansas City, I introduced two practical tools grounded in the work of the Article 15 Project — a global initiative that supports children’s right to self-organize and promote the full range of their rights. One tool focuses on organizational structure, and the other examines decision-making processes. These tools were originally designed with and for children, and that origin matters more than it might seem.
Child-friendly evaluation methods are at risk of being dismissed as simplifications, but I’d argue the opposite is true. Designing for children requires stripping away jargon, creating visual and tactile modes of communication, and building processes that don’t assume participants already hold comfort with traditional data collection and analysis techniques. The result is something far more inclusive than most standard evaluation approaches. And here’s what the Kansas City session confirmed: adults don’t just tolerate these methods, they prefer them. When given tools that invite reflection through drawing, moving, sorting, and discussing rather than filling out forms or writing responses, participants engage more deeply and more honestly. Child-friendly, it turns out, is often just another way of saying human-friendly.
Facilitating this session reinforced several things I want to carry forward:
Starting with what people already know works. Asking participants to reflect on a real organization — rather than a hypothetical — made the tools immediately relevant and the conversations richer.
Power is easier to see when you have a common language. One of the most consistent reactions during the gallery walk was surprise — surprise at how with a visual and tactile approach, it is easier to name things participants may have long sensed but struggled to articulate.
Interpersonal power doesn’t announce itself. It hides in meeting agendas, in who gets interrupted, in which ideas get picked up and which get dropped. Evaluation approaches that skip over this layer of interpersonal power dynamics may be leaving out a significant part of the story.
Finally, these methods travel. Whether you work with youth organizations, nonprofits, government agencies, or community groups, the underlying questions — who has power, how decisions are made, whose voices shape outcomes — are universal.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Article 15 Project and the principles behind these tools, you can explore their work at the Article 15 Project website. Everyone who attended the Kansas City session left with step-by-step instructions for applying both tools in their own organizations, and I’m happy to share those materials — just reach out.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post 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.