We chose this quote for #Be&Become Tuesday because it's both hopeful and active, and calls on both the individual and the collective. Together we can become make audacious dreams happen. But let's give each ourselves and each other grace and rest along the way.

xo

nora

See the original post on the AEA365 blog: https://aea365.org/blog/contribution-leadership-and-renewal-perspective-from-a-path-less-traveled-by-a-rafael-johnson/

My name is A. Rafael Johnson, Director of Creative Evaluation and Engagement, an initiative of Inspire to Change. I’m a novelist, and I’d like to tell you a story of how I came to be an evaluator without training as an evaluator.

In 2010 I taught yoga to a blind orphan in Liberia. I’d arrived as a USAID subcontractor. My NGO was charged with helping rebuild the education system after the end of their long civil war. I reduced the national student:textbook ratio from 5 students per textbook to 4, taught classes of former refugees and combatants, and created a service-learning program. All of this went into the quarterly M&E reports. But in my off-hours, I also worked to get homeless former child soldiers to attend a literacy program, helped college staff learn to...

Nora Murphy Johnson is a founding member of Inspire to Change and TerraLuna Collaborative, as well as co-founder of the Developmental Evaluation Institute. Nora and host Melissa Olson spoke for the better part of the hour about how evaluation is a critical resource for organizations who are ready to make lasting social change. Tune in to Sanctuary, Arts & Activism heard only KFAI 90.3 Fresh Air Radio on Mondays at 1pm.

Thank you, Melissa Olson, of KAFI Fresh Air Radio. She interviewed A. Rafael Johnson on her show Sanctuary, Arts and Activism.

Did you love it? Want to hear more of Melissa's fabulous show? Tune in to Sanctuary at 1 pm, Mondays on KFAI Fresh Air Radio. Sanctuary can also be streamed on KFAI.org. Thanks for listening!

See the original post on the AEA365 blog: https://aea365.org/blog/a-look-at-language-week-on-the-absence-of-whiteness-by-a-rafael-johnson/

I’m A. Rafael Johnson, Director of Creative Evaluation & Engagement, an initiative of Inspire to Change. I use the methodologies of the arts to gather, analyze, and report data for communities, arts organizations, and non-arts organizations. But I’m a writer and novelist before I’m an evaluator. Words matter to me.

For me, words carry meaning. In fact, words are a type of social contract. Words mean what societies agree they mean, such as benchmark, formative, and reliability. Each word carries a socially agreed-upon meaning that communicates values, emotions, taboos, and power relationships. Some words, such as indicator, meta-evaluation, and qualitative, withhold knowledge from some while transmitting to others.

So instead of retiring a word, I want to encourage evaluators to use a particular word to...

See the original post on the AEA365 blog: https://aea365.org/blog/a-look-at-language-week-words-that-make-me-cringe-by-nora-murphy-johnson/

Hi! My name is Nora Murphy Johnson, CEO of Inspire to Change.

Our blog posts this week are written by Minnesota evaluators working in justice and equity spaces, focus on words–words to retire, discard, or include. I am writing about words that make me cringe because the “cringe” feeling is a message from my body to my brain. “STOP! Reflect on what you just said.”

Lesson Learned: Some words should make me cringe. Growing up white in the United States, I had the privilege of experiencing the English language as neutral. Many uncomfortable and regrettable experiences have taught me that language is anything but neutral. Language shapes the way I see, think about, talk about, and experience our world. When I don’t interrogate the roots and multiple meanings of words, I risk being complicit in...