Informing Change, Justice Outside, and The Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley (LHS) came together to design, implement, and evaluate Working Towards Racial Equity (WTRE) (National Science Foundation award 2005829), a multi-year, virtual workshop series that fosters inclusive, equitable, and just work environments in the outdoor environmental science and education (OESE) field via deep personal, organizational, and systems transformation.

WTRE ran from 2020 to 2023, reaching 20 organizations across 2 cohorts to regularly participate in workshops and receive ongoing support.

As WTRE’s external third-party evaluator, we explored the experiences and changes associated with implementing and participating in WTRE . The evaluation supported programmatic changes, assessed the potential for WTRE to be applicable and useful in the wider OESE field, and illuminated insights about supporting equity-centered transformation among organizations.

Each participating WTRE organization established two teams (“strands”): 1) an Organizational Systems Change (OSC) team to represent the organization and participate in WTRE. Each OSC team was a distributed, vertical leadership team comprising 3-7 individuals representing different leadership levels and organizational spheres of influence. 2) a Professionals of Color (POC) team, comprising individuals from the organization who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color. Individuals could be part of both teams if desired so long as they met their organization’s requirements to participate in that organization’s OSC team and identified as a person of color. All but one participating organization recruited a POC team to join WTRE programming.

The WTRE model itself consists of two distinct phases: a 3–5-month workshop series (the “intensive”) and an ~18-month period of ongoing support, consultation, peer support, and monthly meetings (“ongoing support”). The intensive includes half- and whole-day virtual workshops for the OSC strands, for POC strands, and for both strands together. The intensive also includes assigned readings and activities to be completed between the workshop days. WTRE provided approximately 50 hours of workshop time to each strand in each cohort during the intensive. The second phase (ongoing support) consists of monthly meetings, opportunities for consultation, and peer-mentorship opportunities.

WTRE’s kick-off was originally imagined as a week-long, in-person retreat, scheduled for spring 2020. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lawrence Hall of Science and Justice Outside adapted the week-long, in-person intensive for the initial  cohort into a virtual format. While the in-person element was lost, benefits were gained from the move to virtual, including the ability to increase the number of people who participated from each organization and the ability to engage the group over a longer period.

WTRE’s origins trace back to a 2018 study that confirmed the deep divide in how organization leaders prioritize and understand racial equity, inclusion, and diversity, and how professionals of color in the field perceive those efforts and the field overall. Additional pre-project research showed that, as in other walks of life, the OESE field contained systemic barriers and implicit bias adversely affecting participation and representation for people and professionals of color.

Drawing on the framework laid out in the Water of Systems Change, Justice Outside and LHS addressed these gaps and barriers through WTRE by supporting staff, leaders, and board members in OESE organizations in examining and redefining their organizational policies, practices, and culture to become more equitable and welcoming for professionals of color. This would, in turn, bring about positive changes for their staff, in their programming, and within the communities where organizations work.

With Justice Outside and LHS forming a program team to collaboratively design and implement the work, and an LHS-based research team to examine resulting changes at the individual and organizational levels, our role as the evaluation team was to support ongoing learning, improvements, and enhancements from the first to the second cohort and to assess the project’s effectiveness for participating organizations and professionals.

To gather timely feedback and learnings for program adaptation and improvements, our approach incorporated the following structures:

As WTRE unfolded, our team was immersed in the project and seen as “part of the team.” This occurs infrequently in a field where evaluation projects typically bring consultants on after a program is about to end or has ended, but is valuable as it fosters strong relationships to nurture a culture of learning amongst program implementors and participants alike. Our partnership was one of strong collaboration and strategic accompaniment, and exemplifies the way LHS prioritized learning and evaluation for WTRE’s duration.

As Equitable Evaluation™ practitioners, we incorporated participant voices to ensure project refinements carried weight and relevance by centering the input from people with first-hand experience of the work.

Along with LHS, we formed a Research and Evaluation Advisory Group (Advisory Group) comprised of past and present WTRE participants and other professionals of color to assist with research instrument development, analysis framework development, case site selection, and sensemaking. These practices were good exercises in involving participants while not overburdening them or being extractive; we also compensated evaluation participants and advisory group members for their time and experience in accordance with our standard practices.

After the first cohort ended, we facilitated reflection sessions with the program team and sensemaking sessions with the Advisory Group. The discussions prompted improvements that strengthened the second WTRE cohort. For example, participants raised the need to connect learnings from both strands in the intensive for deeper impact. Sensemaking also deepened the program team’s understanding of the WTRE program experience and supported their real-time decision-making about the program.

“My greatest takeaway and transformational experience is witnessing first-hand the individual and collective growth that myself and my colleagues have undergone. I am honored to be working with talented professionals who are also stronger now in their equity and justice language and understanding – and still much more to learn. I feel that as a collective group, we will continue to uphold our individual and collective learning.”

– WTRE Participant

Our final evaluation report offers a comprehensive account of our findings and recommendations. Along with LHS, we presented on our WTRE work in two different years at the American Evaluation Association’s annual Evaluation conference. Additionally, the LHS research team has published a series of three research briefs:

• Working Towards Racial Equity: Systems Change through Individual Transformation reveals findings from a survey of WTRE program participants.
• Working Towards Racial Equity: Exploring Systems Change in Environmental Learning offers findings from case studies that explore how three WTRE-participating organizations approached systems change efforts.
• 20 Organizations, 3 Years: Insights on Organization-based Racial Equity Work shares the research team’s learnings and reflections from working on WTRE.

In addition to supporting continuous improvements and adaptations, our work on the 2020-23 WTRE program was intended to inform another NSF-funded WTRE cohort that was to run from 2024-26. NSF funding was terminated shortly after implementation began, resulting in the program’s immediate and indefinite cancellation. Even so, we value the commitment of WTRE organizations across the cohorts to creating inclusive, equitable, and just work environments in outdoor science programs. It was an honor to accompany the program and research team on this journey.