Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation TIG Week: Strengthening Allyship with Indigenous Peoples Through Strategic Flexibility and Reflective Practice by Chris Jarrett

Date: Thursday, October 15, 2026

I’m Chris Jarrett, PhD, a non-Indigenous environmental anthropologist currently working as MERL manager at Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS). RFUS is a United States-based NGO supporting Indigenous Peoples throughout Latin America, and globally with the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, to secure and defend their ancestral lands.

Conservationists and climate philanthropists increasingly recognize Indigenous Peoples’ key role as stewards of Intact Forest Landscapes and biodiversity, but Indigenous Peoples continue to receive remarkably small percentages of climate funding. RFUS is a trusted intermediary for Indigenous organizations, providing fundraising support, hands-on capacity strengthening, targeted technical assistance, and advocacy support.

As a lone internal evaluator in this context, my role involves lots of translational work between cultural worlds and a concerted effort to shield our partners from donor demands that could keep them from their urgent, on-the-ground work. While this is still a relatively new position for me, I want to share some thoughts on what has seemed to work well so far, as well as some of the things we are still grappling with.

Lessons Learned

• We select a small set of headline metrics for donors that we periodically update and promote in our fundraising communications, such as the area of Indigenous lands being protected. We are conscious that these are not always the most relevant indicators for understanding what is driving change for our partners, so we try not to let them dominate our time, and we remain open to adapting as donor interests shift.
• We standardize frequently used indicators around broad, interculturally resonant concepts like “community actions to address territorial threats” and use them across multiple projects. This gives our Indigenous partners the flexibility to adapt their strategies to their unique and dynamic contexts, and it keeps their and our reporting burden to a minimum.
• We center ongoing reflection and learning through more open-ended, culturally relevant practices, such as post-activity discussions, midyear check-ins, and regular site visits to our Indigenous partners’ territories. In my experience, these are the spaces—connecting after a community meeting, riding a motorized canoe together on the river, walking together through the forest—where the real factors shaping the effectiveness of our joint work emerge, and where they can best be explored. We often incorporate variations of outcome harvesting and situational analysis into these practices to ensure that we are keeping a wide enough scope for what might be relevant in the diversity of contexts where we operate and that we are staying open to reorienting strategies as conditions evolve.

An ongoing challenge in evaluation of this kind of bridging work is identifying ways to communicate the unique value that movement allies and trusted intermediaries like ours provide —and, importantly, how this work contributes to transforming structural conditions and shifting power. To this end, we are continually reassessing our role and trying to make sure we are not supplanting our Indigenous partners’ roles but instead walking alongside them and keeping their self-determination and autonomy at the core.

Rad Resource

My colleagues and I developed a few case studies with partners exploring some of these themes around the role of trusted intermediaries in facilitating more direct funding for Indigenous Peoples: Contributing to a More Resilient Funding Ecosystem for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: Case Studies on Intermediary Support.

If any of this resonated with you, or you have questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out at cjarrett@rainforestus.org.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Indigenous Peoples in Evaluation (IPE) TIG week. All posts this week are contributed by members of the IPE Topical Interest Group. 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.