Being Responsive: The First Assessment of Culturally Responsive Evaluation in Wisconsin

¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc. is excited to announce the release of Being Responsive: The First Assessment of Culturally Responsive Evaluation in Wisconsin. This report summarizes the findings from the 2017 culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) survey. 

This is the first known survey to assess the use of Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE) in Wisconsin. The survey, along with a series of focus groups with evaluators of color (report available in 2020), is meant to understand a subset of evaluation practices related to CRE. CRE prioritizes social justice, evaluators of color, culture, and context as essential to valid knowledge production in general and evaluation in particular. We are starting the discussion with an emphasis on CRE, how/if/when it is practiced, and the barriers to its use, though we readily recognize the other styles of evaluation (e.g., feminist and emancipatory) and acknowledge that a study of their use in the state would be equally valuable and instructive.

We launched the survey in the fall of 2017, and 54 Wisconsin evaluators and individuals who conduct evaluations responded. In 2018, we began analyzing the results and as part of that process held two in-person data parties with 28 evaluators to analyze the results using data placemats.

We offer our sincerest of thank yous to those that took the time to respond to the survey, leaders in the field of evaluation who reviewed drafts of the report, and those that continue to support this important work. 

In this report, we present a series of recommendations for funders, evaluators, evaluation users and consumers, and other practitioners (e.g., data scientists, universities, government agencies). We invite you to download this report and encourage you to share it with your networks. We plan to use this to build our emancipatory capacity building opportunities in 2020 and then encourage you to do the same. We invite you to share your reflections on the findings and potential uses of the report on social media using #beingresponsive or by submitting them here.