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Between Ego & Environment: (Re)Building a Culturally Responsive & Equity-Grounded Infrastructure

By Dr. Michael Arnold, Partner & Executive Director

ABOUT THIS SERIES

From July to September 2026, the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI), with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is hosting a three-part webinar series exploring ways to expand and enrich community-centered and equity-focused learning and evaluation. Aimed at foundation learning and evaluation staff and consultants to explore what is being built, how community is involved, and what the future can look like, the series convenes funders, evaluation practitioners, and interested community partners to explore opportunities to deepen, extend, and rebuild culturally responsive and community-centered learning and evaluation.

CEI invited me to facilitate these conversations, delving into themes consistently raised across the dialogues my team at Informing Change and our collaborators at Engage R+D have been holding with learning and evaluation practitioners and funders.

I am sharing my reflections from this ongoing series on this blog. Below is Part 2. You can access the recording of this conversation on the CEI website.

Click here to read my reflections from Part 1.

PART 2 INTRODUCTION

You know that moment. You step away from a rich conversation, only to be struck by the question you wish you’d asked but hadn’t. I had that after closing out the second part of the CEI webinar series. 

For Part 2, the lively, audience-engaged conversation with Dr. Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo, Founder of TERSHA LLC and Dr. Veronica Kapnick, Principal Consultant at Great Impacts Consulting, covered a lot of ground related to infrastructure and culturally responsive, equity-centered learning & evaluation (CREE L&E). It bridged the Part 1 session on community power and the upcoming Part 3 session on our collective future. We touched on several topics, but it was only after pressing “leave meeting” that I realized I never explicitly asked, “What does the word ‘infrastructure’ mean to you?”

EVALUATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES

Infrastructure is a broad concept referring to the underlying structures, foundations, and frameworks needed for systems to function. These can be physical, systemic, organizational, and socio-emotional.1

Whether we consider it a field or not, we can think of CREE L&E as a system comprised of many people situated in environments that affect or benefit from learning and evaluation. We bring our ego identities—our sense of self—to these systems. These ego identities may be “practitioner,” “community member,” “funder,” race-gender-class, and any host of intersecting ways we describe and understand ourselves. Ecosystems mediate our interactions with one another and our environments, and infrastructure supports a functioning evaluative ecosystem. I want to highlight three CREE L&E infrastructure features that stood out in our conversation.

 

EQUITY-GROUNDED, CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SUPPLY CHAINS

How do we get the work of L&E into the hands, hearts, and minds of those who want and need it?

Grants and RFPs play an important role in this supply chain infrastructure. Yet, as we’re witnessing with the rapid shift from bandwagon to backlash in government funding, as well as from champion to compliance in philanthropy, equity and cultural responsiveness are not baked into the links of these chains. Many communities, organizations, and consulting and funding partners continue to resist this backsliding and remain committed to the promise, practice, and principles of inclusion, equity, and justice for all. But we may need a new way of navigating these headwinds.

During the overflow chat following the main talk, we had a free-flowing discussion with attendees that surfaced a paradox for CREE: we often work in and for infrastructures that are not themselves characterized by equity and cultural responsiveness. For example, the RFP process poses up to four contradictions to CREE’s aims:

  1. It often perversely incentivizes competition and scarcity mindsets. 
  2. It may concentrate resources and opportunities in the hands of a few.  
  3. It can privilege metrics and compliance over balancing numbers, narrative, and learning. 
  4. It can push community goals to the periphery.

As one astute attendee asked, “Are RFPs discriminating against the community members who we claim should be integral to the entire process? And if so, what should my role as someone who meets those requirements be?”

We had no easy answers to these and other challenges in the RFP process. As with any supply chain, these effects ripple across the L&E ecosystem, affecting ego identities—how communities, practitioners, and funders understand their roles in the L&E system—and environments at the local, regional, and national levels. 

Dr. Kapnick pointed to a promising trajectory in the supply chain that could offer an opportunity to address this challenge: embedded evaluation. Here, L&E is embedded in the work of providing services, mobilizing communities, funding efforts, and repairing environments. Distributed widely enough, and with attention to community-informed rigor and validity, the diversity and prevalence inherent in this could yield a networked L&E system that, by design, draws on a culturally responsive and equity-grounded supply chain infrastructure. 

We also discussed the promise and opportunities of funder collaboratives as an infrastructural support to sustain CREE L&E within and across diverse places and communities. When these collaboratives are grounded in developing shared goals and visions with the communities they resource and serve, they can serve as a boon to continued learning and improvement. But as Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo noted, these relationships need to be characterized by “reciprocal agency and power,” arising from shared accountability, ownership, and decision-making among players, rather than a top-down structure. 

The question I’m left with: how do we make this happen? In different conversations, I’m hearing a return to community players selecting consultants and practitioners directly. This is an option to consider. But we must not overlook the additional supply chain issues it can present to communities. How do we make sure the time, information, and opportunities are accounted for and balanced so as not to overwhelm or distract communities from their work? How do we ensure collateral costs are adequately compensated? How do we keep clout and visibility from biasing and dominating the supply chain? 

We landed on a few needs and requirements to consider as our supply chain continues to evolve and improve.

  • Balance: ensure the asks are explicit while also maintaining flexibility.
  • Prioritize and resource collaboration.
  • Rethink the evaluation consultant role to help build and strengthen community capacity in conducting and sustaining CREE L&E (e.g., providing community training in research and evaluation; requiring, facilitating, and resourcing substantive participation from community members or community-serving organizations throughout the evaluation process).  
  • Do more to respect the time, effort, and resources consultants put into proposal development and response (e.g., a tiered approach to requests, starting with LOIs).

HUMAN TECHNOLOGY

“We have new tech and AI that’s coming in to help us do the work faster and actually bring [evaluative] agency into the folks that are working in organizations … But faster and easier doesn’t always make evaluation better.”

– DR. VERONICA KAPNICK

“The truth is this field has always been about people and that’s not going to change.”

– DR. SHARON ATTIPOE-DORCOO

The handaxe, geometry, irrigation, plants as drugs, paper, iron smelting, the electric telegraph, the cotton gin, computers, nuclear fission—I can go on and on.

Humanity discovers, creates, and innovates. Sometimes, it’s in the service of human flourishing; other times, it’s to our detriment. AI, data tech, and information technology are no different. They are tools to support human technology. In the context of CREE, this is an essential lens. Information comes from many sources and through many modes. But we must value and center our humanity in L&E, including our contradictions, difficult questions, nuances, and uncertainties. 

As with so many things these days, we couldn’t avoid talking about AI, and rightly so. It’s a feature of our present and future technology infrastructure. Dr. Kapnick highlighted how it can benefit embedded evaluation while cautioning us to adhere to the CREE principles of reflective practice when considering the use of AI. Sharon and Veronica raised areas and insights to consider regarding our reflective and reflexive use or avoidance of AI.

  • Is it necessary and beneficial to how we embed evaluation and learning closest to where it is needed? 
  • How does it add to, detract from, or amplify the local context and culture? 
  • When and where are we failing to think critically and reflectively about its use and just blindly adopting it?

“The challenge is taking advantage of all this new stuff that’s coming into the field without losing the importance of the human judgment, the relationships, the context, and of course, the methodological foundations that underpin all of that work.”

– DR. VERONICA KAPNICK

“Those who know me know that I don’t scare easily,” Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo said as she started an anecdote, “But I was scared about what I heard.”

She described hearing someone arguing at a STEM conference that “the only language needed for AI now is not any programming language, but English.” I agreed with her that advocating such a blatantly linguistically, culturally, and contextually biased view of AI should concern us all, especially as we continue seeking equitable tools for human flourishing. On the flip side, it highlights the importance of advocating cultural and linguistic data and wisdom sovereignty in an age when wealthy imperialism is running roughshod over lives. Our commitment to equity and justice, to learning and community wellness, also requires us to consider the environmental challenges and disparate impacts AI brings. We should document, evaluate, and lift community solutions to the inequalities and challenging community predicaments brought on by tools such as AI. 

A CREE lens and reflective practice on the tools for human technology and flourishing are directions to keep exploring and will continually evolve. As Dr. Kapnick said, “CREE is really what brings the flavor to the work. It tells us that context matters, that culture matters, that power matters, and that, of course, the perspectives of our communities are really at the heart of what is important related to the evidence.”

THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF MOTIVATION & INNOVATION

“In order for me to do enduring work, it’s not just doing the work as we physically know it … This work needs to be done in love..”

– DR. SHARON ATTIPOE-DORCOO

CREE L&E systems thrive on motivation, innovation, and leadership from diverse corners.

Multiple people—and the ego identities they bring—take, mobilize, and balance power in our evaluative ecosystems. They shape our tools, structures, and relational dynamics. As Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo stated, “We have ancestors, elders, owing strong principles on responsiveness and responsibility in the field. There’s a vision and a road map for us.”

This vision compels us to the “audaciousness to dream boldly.” This aspect of our infrastructure can’t be dismissed or overlooked. It will sustain us through the challenges we currently face, help us uncover solutions to the problems and questions posed above, and expand the tent and possibilities of what CREE L&E can be. Part of this will be grounded in structures like Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo proposed to build “a longer pipeline” into and through evaluation “where kids can say, ‘Oh, Mom and Dad, I want to be an evaluator when I grow up.’”

Be it through internships, community capacity-building, ongoing career exposure, or training and participatory research, maintaining this career and leadership pipeline requires our endurance, love, and commitment. 

Together, and through an ever-evolving infrastructure, we can find ways to support practices and infrastructures that tackle pressing challenges, like the one posed by an attendee who asked, “How we can start shifting the qualitative aspects of the way we demonstrate impacts to really be representative of the people that we’re trying to serve?” 

As we adapt and improve the infrastructures facilitating our CREE L&E ecosystems, we must imbue these with the values and traits that align with CREE principles: 

  • Curiosity
  • A relational and relationship-building mindset
  • Commitment to purpose, voice, and inclusivity (Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo’s PVI framework that was discussed in the conversation)

CITATIONS

  1. From https://www.nist.gov/infrastructure: Infrastructure is often defined as “the basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.”Other definitions of ‘infrastructure’ can be found at:  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infrastructure, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/what-is-infrastructure, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfrastructureFurther literature on infrastructure includes:

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