Enter the Year of the Snake
The Year of the Snake is well underway. In the past, I’ve found my bearings for the new year by the beginning of Lunar New Year celebrations. This year, of course, has been different. I'm arriving at this year's annual update with jumbled feelings:
Contemplative and resolute as the fire and ash from Octavia Butler's burning world in the Parable of the Sower enter my newsfeed daily.
Joy and wonder as I reflect on how #dataplussoul has taken flight thanks to our incredibly talented team and partners. 2024 was a year of nurturing this work through relationships: building partnerships, building our team, and rolling up our sleeves together.
Our team continues to envision a social sector that uses #dataplussoul to build more equitable and just futures—where evaluations are more rigorous and relevant because they center the stories, assets, and dreams of communities most affected by the work and where data and evaluative practices are generative, not extractive. I’m proud to share the work we accomplished last year and what lies ahead. Here are some connecting threads:
Evaluating participatory decision-making processes. Last year, we conducted two evaluations of participatory decision-making processes. 1) We partnered with the City of Boston as it launched its inaugural participatory budgeting cycle, 2) We evaluated a funding mechanism that established community collectives to steward neighborhood investments. We’ll share more about this work as the projects wrap up this year. For now, we carry forward the reminder that participatory processes are never binary (yes, a decision was participatory). Instead, we ask: "In what ways did the process enable participation; by whom? and when?"
Coaching and technical assistance to program and evaluation teams. Not everyone needs an external evaluator. We continued to receive requests from nonprofits and funders wanting to offer coaching and support to their teams (or grantees) to create more cohesive learning agendas and aligned data practices. Through these engagements, we are most excited to break through the notion that evaluation only comes at the end of a project. Evaluation tools are design tools, and they can be used to engage community members throughout the design, learning, and evaluation cycle. One organization already had a pulse on what youth wanted out of their new program and asked us to advise on the sequencing of their youth engagement. They wanted to make sure their measures of success were aligned. Another org had a small evaluation team that was eager to build their skills in culturally responsive data practices. We decided to dedicate our monthly coaching sessions to improving existing data collection instruments and processes. In 2024, we coached 20 organizations spanning housing, arts and culture, community health, youth development, and climate justice. We have a few more spots for coaching and technical assistance partnerships this year. Reach out if you’re thinking about offering these to your grantees or program teams.
Holding space for learning and emergence in service of shaping systems change. Many of our partners are funders trying to shift towards trust-based philanthropy while balancing a need to learn about the impact and efficacy of their funding portfolios. Together, we asked: How can we detect and measure systems shifts across a portfolio? How can we measure portfolio impact systematically while honoring locally rooted ways of knowing? Last year, we published a case study on Evaluating the Ripple Effects of Arts and Culture Grantmaking. This year, our team will present our work in “Re-imagining cross-site evaluation as a collective learning project” at the eighth Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment conference in Chicago.
New project: Data+Soul Studio. Finally, we launched a suite of trainings that explore what tools and practices are needed for evaluators and researchers to make our work with data more equitable, transformative, and full of soul. Now, more than ever, we need community and spaces to ground ourselves, and we need to continue strengthening our data practices in service of rigor. In 2024, we offered our signature half-day workshop in 3 cities ( 👋 Washington DC, St Louis, and Portland) and a longer 6-week virtual cohort and makerspace. We are committed to continuing to offer these in 2025.
How has #dataplussoul shown up in your work over the past year? What is grounding you as you assess the challenges ahead? Please reach out to any of us if you want a thought partner. We look forward to building on this conversation with you.