Sustaining Equity-Centered Evaluation: Reflections from the Field by Evan Gattozzi and Meghan Hunt

Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2026

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.

We’re Evan Gattozzi, Senior Project Manager with Informing Change, and Meghan Hunt, Senior Consultant with Engage R+D. Our two evaluation and learning firms have been working alongside the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation* to sustain and strengthen equity-centered evaluation. At a time of increasing injustice and ongoing threats to equity and equity-centered work, we’re also seeing important efforts to sustain practices and strengthen relationships among equity-centered practitioners and funders, which we want to share today.

Recently, we gathered two American Evaluation Association Topical Interest Groups, Advocacy and Policy Change and Non-Profits and Foundations, to discuss what we’re hearing about equity-centered evaluation from funders and evaluators, inspired by our recent blog post. Below are highlights of specific actions AEA evaluators are taking in their work to sustain equity-centered evaluation:

1. Using our values as a compass: Evaluators are making difficult decisions, such as how to respond to terminology flagged for review by federal agencies or whether to take on a rushed project in a slower economy. Our equity values are guiding these decisions and preserving the intent of our words and focus on the impact on the communities we work with.
2. Championing (and maintaining) equity-centered evaluation practices: Evaluators continue finding ways to advance equity, including advocating for trust-based approaches, budgeting time for and paying community members for their participation in evaluation, and paying for the labor involved in protecting sensitive data (among other practices). Even where further progress is not possible, we’re intent on maintaining the progress we’ve made. 
3. Acting within our sphere of influence: While broad-scale change may feel daunting, evaluators are focusing locally where we have more leverage, examining how our own policies and practices maintain harmful status quo, and taking steps to unlearn or undo them.
4. Protecting data: We are grappling with the tension that collecting less data might protect certain communities right now (e.g., immigrants, trans people) but risks long-term under-representation and erasure. Evaluators are collecting data with heightened security by recording data on paper or devices that are not internet-enabled, avoiding AI, selectively choosing which data are “necessary” to collect, and maintaining anonymity in case studies where we previously would have included names.
5. Emphasizing learning partnerships: While many recent RFPs call for smaller, shorter, and more accountability-focused evaluations, evaluators are urging funders to lean into developmental evaluation and learning efforts, which can support adaption as conditions shift, and holding space for qualitative, community-grounded insight.

Rad Resources

Our colleagues in the field offer many resources to help deepen and embed equity-centered principles into evaluation and learning practices. We hope they inspire you as much as they inspire us:

• Expanding the Bench, where you can post or find evaluation-related funding opportunities connected to culturally responsive and equitable evaluation.
• Strengthening Evaluation Contracting Partnerships Initiative (SECPI), which has compiled resources about equity-centered learning and evaluation.
• The Advocacy and Policy Change and Non-Profits and Foundations AEA TIGs, who hosted the session highlighted in the post and continually facilitate opportunities for learning and networking.
• The Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment (CREA), whose 2026 annual conference centers on collective commitments to advance cultural responsiveness in evaluation and research.

*The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.

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