Date: Sunday, June 15, 2025
I’m Danielle Lemi, PhD, president and founder of C. Baxter, LLC, a justice-rooted research and strategy firm based in Texas. I help mission-driven teams build evaluation practices that center justice, respect staff, and protect their work.
As nonprofits lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding and nonprofit teams are laid off, I’m thinking about how frontline staff must navigate a climate hostile to their work.
I learned the necessity of respecting frontline staff and building their voices into outcomes and program implementation when I faced an ethical dilemma (details changed for confidentiality). Years ago, I scheduled interviews with the client’s staff, brought a tape recorder so I could focus on our conversation, and secured informed consent before hitting “record.”
In those interviews, staff revealed feeling ignored before program implementation. As a result, the organization made missteps in program delivery, resulting in public confusion about how to engage with the program. These testimonies highlighted deeper rifts between leadership and frontline staff. And I had it all on tape…data I didn’t own…that could create risk for the staff who chose to speak with me.
Internally, I weighed my options—do I stop recording, furiously take notes, and potentially miss important pieces of the conversation? Do I keep recording and have this information sitting around that might compromise someone’s job? I decided to trust the staff’s consent and autonomy and kept recording. After I wrote the report, I told my point of contact, “I’d like to delete this data to protect confidentiality. Would that be OK on your end?” They agreed, and I deleted the recording.
Evaluators enter—and reinforce (even unintentionally!)—existing power dynamics. But those same power dynamics determine program success or failure. Before we collect data, we must consider who holds power, whose voices are vulnerable, and how we will manage risk and safety in data collection and storage.
Knowing what I know now, I’d follow these steps before starting:
3 steps to account for power dynamics before you evaluate:
Frontline staff are the heartbeat of mission-driven work. Today, take stock of your own data ethics plan and how you might center labor in your evaluation—protecting workers is more important now than ever.
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