We couldn’t have been more excited about the 2022 American Evaluation Association conference theme: (Re)Shaping Evaluation Together—especially following the Presidential Town Hall we presented at on Reimagining Equity, Social Justice, and Decolonization. At CEI, we had the honor to present in the following sessions:

• Winning isn’t everything: Evaluating Advocacy that Builds Power: While getting policy wins and systems changes remains an important objective, what does it mean to center impacted communities as the drivers of change? What does it mean to make building community & power the ultimate goal of advocacy work?
  • • Download our handout on advocacy that builds power.
    • View our slide deck from our AEA ’22 session.

• Take Stock and Reshaping Complex Community Change Evaluations: Exploring Innovative Methods & Tools for Causal Analysis: Philanthropy is meeting this global moment of multiple crises by going big and bold, with significant investments to solve some of humanity’s greatest problems. Evaluation must also meet the challenge. The California Endowment’s 10-year, $1 billion Building Health Communities (BHC) initiative is an example of going big and bold, and the evaluation was a testing ground for what it takes to learn about and support a dynamic, complex, multi-geography strategy.
  
  • • Download our handout on causal methods and myths.
• Voices of Decolonizing Evaluation: Moving from Discussion to Action: This Think Tank brings together authors who contributed to the AEA 365 Decolonizing Evaluation week of blog posts (November 2021) to engage in a discussion of how we can use a decolonization praxis in our everyday work as evaluators as we consider: “How can we be in community and connected to our mental, physical, and spiritual selves as we practice evaluation through a decolonized lens?”

And here were a few of our favorite sessions:

• Trust-based Philanthropy and Robust Learning & Evaluation: Oil and Water or a Match Made in Heaven?
  
• Sex, Data, and the Material Conditions of Transgender Life: Telling Liberatory Stories through Evaluation.
  
• Advisory committees for evaluation of community power-building programs: experiences and lessons learned.
  
• Building Capacity for Systems Transformation: Tools for Engaging Stakeholders in the Design of Equity-Focused Evaluation.