Creative Evaluation

At Inspire to Change, we support purpose-driven change and changemakers in a variety of ways, including through Creative Evaluation. Creative Evaluation (CE) discovers impact by combining elements of developmental evaluation, principles-focused evaluation, and arts-based evaluation to understand highly complex human systems and work towards understanding and solving difficult social issues. Developmental evaluation examines how human systems operate in dynamic, novel environments with complex interactions, focusing on innovation and strategic learning. Principles-focused evaluation examines whether the principles that inform and guide our decisions are clear, meaningful, and actionable, whether they are followed, and whether they are leading to desired results. Arts-based evaluation examines how human cultures encode wisdom and values in the arts, and is especially effective in capturing emotional and cultural realities. 

DEVELOPMENTAL EVALUATION

Creative Evaluation and Engagement (CE&E) is a high-needs environment. There are multiple relationships that require care and attention, including your relationship with yourself. At the same time, you are working towards a more just and equitable world, meaning that you’ll most certainly encounter oppression and injustice and become a holder of the stories of people most harmed and traumatized by that oppression and injustice. This requires that care for yourself and your team is an essential thread that must run through your CE&E work. It may also require a new way of thinking about care and wellbeing, which traditionally have been thought of as something one does at the individual level. 

I’m a co-author on a report based on three and a half years of research and evaluation on wellbeing in social entrepreneurs (what we at Inspire to Change call “Changemakers”). A major finding of this work is that there is no well-being for social...

Hi! I’m Abbey Ogg, the Social Media Coordinator at Inspire to Change. I am a student at Central High School in Minnesota. I connected with Inspire to Change through my advocacy for pollinator protection and against climate change. I am passionate about removing systemic racism and biases from ourselves and our society, defeating climate change, and the uplifting of oppressed people everywhere. I believe in bringing people into these discussions, and talking through problems rather than fighting through them. I enjoy learning about the vast range of stories, cultures, and places our world has to offer us. I am a big reader, some of my all-time favorite books being The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Dear Martin by Nic Stone, and any and all of the Calvin And Hobbes books by Bill Watterson. That is a very, very shortened version of that list. I also really enjoy music. I play the piano and the ukelele and am hoping to be able to learn the guitar soon. I play soccer for my school and...

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With December 6's global youth climate strike in mind, we started our new video series, "Inspire to Change: What's on our mind?" with a short video of our social media manager, Abbey Ogg, talking about why she cares about environmental justice. Abbey is a freshman at St. Paul Central High School who participated in the strike and loved it! She is excited to further her social justice work with our new series.