This October, we’re celebrating 20 years of Informing Change. For the past two decades, our company’s founding values of intelligence, integrity, and compassion have guided everything we do, from who we work with, to the way we do our work. When we added the pursuit of social justice to our values in 2015, we did so to make explicit what has been implicit in our work all along: our commitment to a more just world across all aspects of our work, even in the face of complex, long-term, and often messy roads toward change. As I often remind the staff here at Informing Change, “The pursuit of social justice is just as much about how we do our work as it is why we do our work.”

We have always partnered with our social sector clients to answer tough questions, and these partnerships, more often than not, prompt new, more illuminating areas of inquiry. As we celebrate who we’ve been and look toward the future to grow and evolve, we continue to grapple with difficult questions. Those that we’re wrestling with now include:

• In the social sciences, what counts as truth, to whom, under what conditions, and why?
• How can we reintroduce context as central to evaluation findings, rather than view it as an optional supplement?
• How might we use strategies like developmental evaluation, humble inquiry, and participatory design to promote equitable and compassionate evaluation practices?

We want to take this opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to our values and to the work we do, and to thank our clients, partners, and the larger community for collaborating with us these past twenty years. We look forward to continuing to learn with you.

If you’re in the Bay Area on 10/5, we’d love to see you at our anniversary celebration. RSVP here.