Date: Monday, September 21, 2026
I am Art Hernández, professor in the Dreeben School of Education at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. My work sits at the intersection of culturally responsive and equitable evaluation (CREE), community power, and the philosophical foundations of evaluation practice.
Restorative leadership is a relational, justice-centered approach rooted in restorative justice (Hernandez, A.E., 2025). It emphasizes relational accountability, healing-centered engagement, “power with” rather than “power over,” and a cyclical disposition of caring, knowing, and doing (Hernandez, A.E., 2026; Zehr, 2015). It is increasingly visible in community-based and community power initiatives, yet it remains under-specified as theory. That under-specification is both an evaluation problem and an evaluation opportunity, one that CREE is uniquely positioned to address in two ways.
Restorative Leadership as Evaluand. CREE insists that culture is central, not incidental to theory specification (Hood et al., 2015). Evaluating CREE-based initiatives without culturally grounding their constructs risks measuring a decontextualized abstraction. For example, in Latino/a – Hispanic communities, the theory’s core constructs find culturally specific expression, e.g.: relational accountability lives in confianza (trust earned through sustained presence) and personalismo (relationship as the precondition for legitimate action); collective identity resonates with familismo (selfhood bound to communal wellbeing); healing-centered truth-telling parallels testimonio (narrative as knowledge, witness, and repair), etc. These constructs are not translations of the theory; they are theory-constitutive. Specification should therefore proceed with the community rather than merely about it: co-defining constructs, validating indicators against community meaning, and treating cultural knowledge as evidence rather than context.
The Evaluator as Restorative Leader. The same caring–knowing–doing cycle (Hernandez, 2026) describes an evaluative stance consistent with CREE commitments to cultural competence (American Evaluation Association, 2011). Caring is relational accountability to the community, not solely to the contract. Knowing is epistemic humility: learning history, language, and power from community members as co-creators of knowledge. Doing is participatory, healing-aware practice: dialogue circles, shared sense-making, and findings returned in forms the community can use to build its own agency. Evaluating this way, our practice itself becomes an instance of the theory we are specifying – a reflexive loop in which evaluation both tests and develops restorative, community leadership.
Communities do not need evaluators to validate their leadership, culture, practice, or performance; they need evaluators willing to be led, to care enough to stay, know enough to act justly, and do the work with, not for, the people whose futures are at stake.
The American Evaluation Association is hosting Latina/o Responsive Evaluation Discourse TIG Week. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from LaRED Topical Interest Group 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 do so using the form on our website. 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.