Date: Thursday, September 11, 2025
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.
Hello, I’m Fardin (far-deen) Rahman, MPH. I am an Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health Fellow at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This post continues the series: What is reflective practice (and why is it important to us as individuals and evaluators)?
In 2024, I attended a workshop at the American Evaluation Association Summer Institute, “Trauma-informed and equitable evaluation: tools and practices towards healing and liberation.” Trauma-informed evaluation focuses on community as central to an inquiry and uses five principles: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. Although I consider trauma in my work, this workshop revealed that others might not.
Turns out, we don’t all evaluate in the same ways. In this moment of reflection, I understood that my background and experiences influence how I do evaluative work. The workshop also helped me explore what we, as a field and individually, can do to enrich how we approach evaluation.
Bring your identities to work. As someone raised in a Bangladeshi immigrant household in New York City, it was natural for me to consider trauma and its effects on health. Previously, I worked with South Asian people with chronic illnesses. While we focused on recognizable risk factors affecting their physical health, I had moments to ask about interpersonal trauma, including physical or emotional abuse experienced at home or elsewhere. In doing so, I was able to create safe spaces for them to talk about their trauma and communicate with them about their needs. I assumed talking about trauma was common for public health professionals. However, just because I’m thinking about it, does not mean others are too. For me and others, this workshop provided new insights on how we can expand evaluation practices toward greater inclusivity and equity.
Put your learnings into practice. Above all, the workshop clarified how trauma is a mechanism for inequity, and addressing trauma through evaluation can support posttraumatic growth. For me, this realization alone justifies the need for evaluators to be trauma informed. In my first project as a fellow, I analyzed content on indigenous data sovereignty in different materials and sources. I know people who have struggled to receive care due to language barriers and understand that disparities exist in health systems. So, I looked for content on historical trauma in materials I reviewed and coded. I asked questions to focus conversations on indigenous perspectives and put forward evaluation questions that placed traumatic experiences and traumatic growth at the forefront of evaluation design. Now, I see how incorporating trauma-related content in my work actually aligns with principles shared in the workshop.
Evaluate how you evaluate. As a workshop participant, I had opportunity to explicitly examine evaluation practices I do intuitively. It showed me how aspects of my identity surface in my work. There’s so much we could be doing to make our practices more respectful, mindful, and strengths-based, and this workshop provided usable principles for trauma-informed evaluation. Reflection can be a starting point for anyone who is new to trauma-informed evaluation or wants to do more or better.
My work with groups who have been marginalized helped me prioritize empathy, cultural sensitivity, and humility when engaged with these communities. Each of us can be trauma-informed; we can look for ways to apply these principles in our work and hold each other accountable in kind, meaningful ways. This is one way that I support healing and liberation.
In previous posts on this topic, Martha Brown explained principles of trauma-informed evaluation, Janice D’souza provided tips for trauma-informed data collection, and Elizabeth DiLuzio shared a real-world example of how to facilitate this work.
Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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