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Moving Back to Lean In: Taking Our Place in Community Power

By Michael Arnold, Partner & Executive Director

INTRODUCTION

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 will be sharing my reflections from this ongoing series, starting with Part 1. For Part 1, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with two award-winning and dynamic community psychologists working in this space: Dr. Dawn Henderson, founder of We Claim Research (Durham, North Carolina), and Dr. Dominica McBride, founder and CEO of BECOME (Chicago, Illinois). We discussed the role of evaluation and learning in community power, and how we engage and show up in activating this power. Our role in healing was a core theme throughout the discussion.

You can access the recording on the CEI website.

EVALUATION & COMMUNITY POWER

“Move back, move the hell out of the way, stop blocking, stop obstructing, and believe that communities know how to solve the problems they care about.”

– DR. DAWN HENDERSON

“Lean in but do something different … The more that we are siloed and isolated and divided, the harder it’s going to be for us to really do anything about this situation that we’re in right now. We really have to come together to lean into each other and each other’s power.”

– DR. DOMINICA MCBRIDE

Drs. Henderson and McBride’s words remind us that, as consultants and funders committed to expanding community power, while we are members of the communities we engage with, we are not the center of these communities. We must get out of the way while leaning into the relationships and connections that activate and sustain that power. This may mean letting go of how we have been conditioned to understand power, and in so doing, embracing the power we have with each other and centering the power and wisdom embedded in our communities.

This shift is healing. Through healing, we transform power, which in turn further expands healing and transformation. This continual process of expanding and transforming is at the root of systems change through community power.

There is no doubt that evaluators and funders have a role to play in supporting and facilitating these processes. But, as Drs. Henderson and McBride highlighted throughout our conversation, it is crucial that we take our place within them: in other words, getting out of the way to lean in.

HEALING THROUGH LEARNING

The balancing act of moving out of the way and leaning in is essential to power, healing, and learning. To transform power, we need healing. To bring about healing, we need to rethink learning.

As Dr. Henderson emphasized in personal correspondence, we move back so we can learn from our communities and lean in so we can learn with them. Moving out of the way allows us to embrace others within a circle of expertise. It brings in other perspectives, helping us expand beyond our own narrow views and ways of understanding. This shift in how we approach learning has a profound influence on healing.

Think of healing as a chain of interrelated processes within bodily, social, and institutional systems. The processes show up in many ways, but we can cluster them into four links in the chain:

  1. Acknowledging and reckoning with the harm that has happened or is happening;
  2. Repairing the immediate harm within or for ourselves and others;
  3. Restoring balance, connection, and wholeness within ourselves, with others, and with the world around us; and
  4. Rebuilding bodily, social, and institutional systems that avoid or reduce exposure to harm, and strengthen capacities to quickly and appropriately reckon, repair, and restore in the face of harm.

These aspects of healing processes are at work in institutional reparations1, trauma-informed care 2,3, and cultural practices and wisdom4,5, to name a few. They arise internally (within the individual), interpersonally (in relationships and connections between people), and institutionally (in structurally embedded dynamics)6.

Learning—the active process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, values, or behaviors through study, teaching, or life experience—informs these healing processes and spaces.

These features of healing and learning coursed through our conversation, and Drs. Henderson and McBride discussed ways for us to continue to foster healing in support of community power and transformation.

HEALING INSIDE & OUT

“Basically, I’m trying to harness and activate people power. I don’t think I can give people power. I think I’m just moving out of the way.”

– DR. DAWN HENDERSON

For healing to happen, moving out of the way can’t be seen as merely stepping aside. It requires an active process of facilitating healing within us and between ourselves and others.

Getting out of the way is central to healing. “The most powerful thing is our ability to relinquish what we call power,” Dr. Henderson said. This process is about healing because “the imbalance of power comes from the divides, the hierarchies that have been created.” This shift in power and this journey of healing require inner and outer transformation.

“We have to be connected to ourselves and accept ourselves so we can truly accept another person and all their truths and all the complexity that they bring to that moment and to the relationship.”

– DR. DOMINICA MCBRIDE

Drs. Henderson and McBride discussed mindset and practice shifts that can aid us on this journey and in creating spaces that expand opportunities for collective healing. These include:

  • Embracing prioritization: Occasionally, the work of project scopes, activities, and objectives needs to take a backseat to the work of recalibrating and restoring healthy relationships among partners.
  • Rethinking time: As with holding our values when determining what needs to take priority in the moment, we also need to rethink the concept of time as scarcity and consider the abundance of time we have available to engage with each other and make changes.
  • Reclaiming human-centered spaces and environments: Structuring our engagement spaces and environments in ways that consider the whole, complex person, and allow for courageous vulnerability (“vulnerageous,” as one of Dr. McBride’s team members put it).
  • Adopting healing practices: These include restorative practices such as breathing, meditation, stretching, and sharing openly and honestly.

“People come into this world as powerful beings.”

– DR. DAWN HENDERSON

Shifting our mindsets, engaging in our own healing journeys, and creating spaces for collective healing are ways we activate power. It demands awareness that we all hold power and awakening to the ways we foster or obstruct this core feature of our shared humanity. This is how we provide service and value to our communities and help, in the words of Dr. Henderson, “get people to solutions and proximity to dreams.” As Dr. McBride highlighted, this is an ongoing journey: “It’s definitely a process of becoming; it doesn’t end right there.”

COMMUNITY POWER IS CHANGING SYSTEMS

“Live with them, love them, learn from them, work with them, start with what they have, build on what they know, and in the end, when the work is done, the people will rejoice and say, ‘We have done it ourselves,’ because they did.”

– DR. DOMINICA MCBRIDE

Drs. Henderson and McBride described ways that moving out of the way while leaning into their communities activated community power to transform systems—the interconnected parts that form a whole. By “systems,” I’m including governmental systems, structures, and all the interconnected parts that shape how our lives are governed, regulated, and respected daily, as well as social or professional systems—the expectations and interactions that shape how we move through our social worlds.

In the learning and evaluation systems of which we practitioners and funders are a part, Drs. Henderson and McBride highlighted how continually balancing moving out of the way and leaning in is actively transforming community learning, healing, and power, and the system itself.

For example, BECOME’s Community Evaluation Innovation Lab (CEIL) prepares community evaluators through training, field experience, professional development, and access to mini-grants. CEIL shapes and expands the field of evaluation and the systems within it, while activating communities to use evaluation to address and transform other systems that affect them. CEIL evaluators, partners, community members, and leaders are designing the first-ever system of social development for and with youth to address youth issues in the Chicago area with solutions sparked by youth and grounded in their personal and evidence-informed understanding of the challenges they face.

As evident throughout the stories shared by Drs. Henderson and McBride, we can help usher in true community-centered changes in systems when we show up differently, casting aside the “professional distance” we are often trained to accept, establishing spaces for healing, trust, and innovation to take hold, and shifting narratives and mindsets about evaluation and communities. Dr. Henderson emphasized that this is not simply about reforming systems that have long failed to make even minor shifts. It’s about building new systems.

Trusting that communities hold the solutions requires that we move out of the way, but also that we lean in and acknowledge what we bring—the baggage and the benefits—in being of service to and members in our communities.

CITATIONS

  1. Ponce, K., Garcia, E., Gerson, T., & Schlege, R. (2024, January). CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION: Philanthropy’s Role in Reparations for Black People in the DMV. National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. https://ncrp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/NCRP-reckoning-launch.pdf
  2. Fortuna LR, Tobón AL, Anglero YL, Postlethwaite A, Porche MV, Rothe EM. Focusing on Racial, Historical and Intergenerational Trauma, and Resilience: A Paradigm to Better Serving Children and Families. Child Adolesc Psychiatr Clin N Am. 2022 Apr;31(2):237-250. doi: 10.1016/j.chc.2021.11.004. Epub 2022 Feb 25. PMID: 35361362.
  3. DeCandia, C., & Guarino, K. (2020). Trauma-Informed Care: An Ecological Response. Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, 25, 7–32. https://doi.org/10.5195/jcycw.2015.69
  4. See the El Nido Family Center’s work with their Peace and Healing Centers: https://www.elnidofamilycenters.org/post/healing-communities
  5. See Explorations Into Relational Repair, a report we collaborated on with the Compton Foundation that details the reflections, intentions, and experiences of practitioners engaged in relational repair.
  6. For more on the levels of healing framework by the National Equity Project, see: https://www.nationalequityproject.org/frameworks/levels-of-healing

RESOURCES

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