PSESD’s Strategy, Evaluation & Learning team supports racially just and humanizing education systems. We help you generate actionable information that helps you do your most important work better.   

VALUES  

We understand that evaluation and data practices in public agencies, nonprofits, and foundations have historically been extractive, deficit-based, and disconnected from what is most meaningful to those doing the work and the communities they serve. Our values are a counterweight to these practices:  

• Those doing the work have the best solutions to the challenges at hand, especially folks working in organizations that are closely connected to the communities they serve.  
• Community cultural wealth is strong in our region and our state, and community-based organizations (CBOs) and their allies support the growth and flourishing of these resources.  
• Many organizations are engaged in transformational practices, rooted in resilience, creativity, and liberation, to create different ways of being in service to communities and change.  
• There are ways of rooting evaluation and data practices in community ways of knowing in a respectful way, which serve the organization and support mutual accountability with funders and the public.  
• Evaluation and data capacity building is a multi-directional relationship. CBO staff and capacity builders bring different gifts to the table and learn from each other in an ongoing way. As capacity builders, we bring tools and resources to the table when invited and do this in the spirit of learning and power-sharing.  
• Culturally responsive evaluation practices are the foundation of our team’s work. We pay attention to how culture is positioned in our evaluations, and how cultural norms and practices are reflected in programs we work with. We continually reflect on our own cultural contexts and biases, and how these impact our ways of working with different clients, families, and students.   
• We consider all our work to be relationship-based and bring participatory methods to our projects.  
• We pay attention to whose stories are centered in our work with partners.