HSE TIG Week: Putting the People First in Human Services Evaluation (HSE) by Asma M. Ali, Rachel Yakobashvili, Anna C. Gersh, and Mansoor Kazi

Date: Sunday, June 21, 2026

We are Asma M. Ali, Rachel Yakobashvili, Anna C. Gersh, and Mansoor Kazi, the current leaders of the Human Services Evaluation (HSE) Topical Interest Group. Welcome to HSE TIG Week! 

HSE TIG members evaluate programs across the human services field, including homelessness and housing, domestic violence services, arts education, and child and family programs and others. We work in very different settings, but we keep coming back to the same belief: good human services evaluation begins with people, and with care for the communities we serve, the teams we work on, and ourselves. Data, designs, and methods all matter, but they work best when they are based on strong relationships, genuine care, and honest self-awareness. Our featured posts this week begin with care and self-awareness and move through building and sustaining relationships with others in our projects and through our methods.

Lessons Learned

This week’s posts reinforce that people are the center of our HSE work. Although we sometimes experience tension between rigor and responsiveness in our work, these posts offer that putting people first enhances own experiences, our relationships, and our projects. Our posts highlight themes that we see come up repeatedly in HSE practice among our TIG members.

• Start with care. HSE work often means hearing hard things, and the emotional weight for us and others can add up. Caring for yourself and others by building time to reflect, process, and set boundaries is not a luxury. This practice is what keeps us able to engage with our HSE communities thoughtfully and sustainably over the long run.
• Consider your positionality. Before we ask for anything from a community, it helps to look at our own capacity, our own positionality, and the assumptions we bring to a project. Evaluators who think about how their background shapes their reading of the data usually produce more credible findings.
• Earn buy-in before you collect information from others. Rapport is not a box to check before the real work begins. A collaborative, low-pressure environment is often what separates data that reflects what is really happening from data that reflects what people think you want to hear.
• Treat partnerships as capacity. Many human services evaluators work alone or with limited resources. Partnerships with universities, students, agency staff, and the people closest to a program help a single evaluator do more, and they keep the work grounded in practice and realistic.
• Connect activities to outcomes. Moving from counting what a program does to understanding what has changed is a challenging task. This shift to learning is an outcome that evaluation can help an organization build, which turns evaluation from a reporting requirement into a tool for learning.

Hot Tip

If you take one thing into your next project, try having an honest conversation before you finalize the design and begin your projects. Ask the people who run and use the program what a useful answer would look like to them. It is a small step, but it changes much of what comes after, and it costs only your time and attention.

Get Involved

The posts this week come from members who apply these ideas in very different contexts. We hope you will read along and join the conversation on any post that speaks to you own work. If these ideas resonate with you, please consider joining the Human Services Evaluation TIG and sharing your own experiences with our group. Reach out to us at HumanServicesTIG@gmail.com to learn more!

The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Human Services Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Human Services Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our Human Services Evaluation 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.