Date: Friday, January 9, 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.
Dear Evaluators! Our names are Jennifer Thompson, François-Daniel Portelance, and Charlotte Schwass and we are three emerging evaluators working in community-engaged evaluation in the education sector. We are members of a larger evaluation team working with two principal evaluators who have many established relationships across Ontario and Canada. We are writing to share our experiences and perspectives of working in an Evaluation Practice Partnership (EPP) within an education program. While the principal evaluators had more frequent and deeper engagements with the community partners, this blog post offers the perspectives of three emerging evaluators who worked outside of the project lead role.
EPPs hold similar characteristics to their research counterpart Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs); they include long-term collaboration, mutual benefit and co-construction, focus on practice-relevant problems, knowledge mobilization, equity and inclusivity, and networking.
For our particular EPP, the principal evaluators had pre-existing relationships with our partners (the result of years of trust-building). Coming into this partnership as emerging evaluators, navigating these pre-existing relationships while establishing our own amidst the regular workflow often felt like a “race against time”, or perhaps a secondary priority. We prioritized respecting their limited time, focusing instead on consultation about contextual needs, and tangible project progress in most of our interactions. In some ways, it challenged our ability to recognize shared values and hear about experiences and perspectives of the organization that would allow us to build deeper connections during analysis and develop grounded insights into the impacts of our shared work.
We recognize the potential enrichment of the interconnectivity of this work through embedding longer relationship-building focused elements into our partnerships, which our team will prioritize. However, we also recognize that this isn’t always possible, especially when EPPs may be with smaller organizations with limited time and resources. Therefore, practitioners could include opportunities to build those connections in the anticipated collaboration sessions whenever and however possible. We love this article Relationships make research-and researchers – whole by Kim Mooney-Doyle and Janet A. Deatrick on the importance and role of relationships, as well as some great tips and tricks!
Our work opened opportunities for “windows” into the organization through working groups, advisory boards, and meet & greet events, allowing us to develop a more fulsome understanding of both the organizations and our partners. We found some great articles and blog posts that talk about strategies for engagement including the Power of a 45 second Investment in Relationship Building and Building Sustainable Models of Research–Practice Partnerships Within Educational Systems.
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