Thanks to the Human Venture Institute and Blythe Butler as thought partners.
Note: The post was also included in the Developmental Evaluation Institute’s e-Anthology in Spring 2018.
As individuals, we make decisions about who we are responsible for. Often our families, friends, and neighbors make that list. As societies, we also make decisions about who we are responsible for and what that responsibility looks like. When I think about social justice, I think about the way we approach this co-responsibility, who it gets extended to, and who it does not. These decisions about co-responsibility haven’t emerged from the ether. They are built on complex histories that have told us who should be considered human; what all humans deserve as basic rights; and the resulting structures that perpetuate these decisions about how we should care for one another.
It is desperately important to extend this co-responsibility as far out as possible to all humans, other life forms, and our planet. That being said, it is difficult to understand how an individual or organization may contribute to that. 
As a developmental evaluator, understanding how to support the organizations and people that I work with to support social justice is complex. How do we make a difference when the structures that perpetuate injustices are so much bigger than ourselves? What does a small step in the right direction look like? How do we know that short term success doesn’t actually have long term, perverse consequences in the long term?
While I certainly don’t have all of the answers to these questions, the following are things I have considered as I work alongside organizations to support positive change.
Relying on learning to evaluate just-ness: While it may be obvious when an individual, organization, or practice is causing harm, it’s much trickier to assess whether it’s supporting positive change. This becomes very clear once we consider that we all exist within broader contexts and that progress happens slowly. Learning needs to play an essential role for applying judgments about the just-ness of situations: to develop an understanding of how those situations came to be and how to move forward in a positive direction.
Learning in these types of situations is tricky but it is essential to rely on more than how something feels in the moment. As evaluators, we are responsible for working with our partners to develop learning strategies that acknowledge these constraints and to figure out ways of working within them.
Evaluation that takes into account broader contexts: Working in a way that supports social justice is complex. Structures and institutions that reproduce social injustices are outside of the control of any individual initiative or organization. What does it look like to support social justice given this constrained situation? A developmental evaluator’s role is to understand the context enough to identify challenges and opportunities related to social justice that are actionable for that initiative and to support others to do the same. While any effort is constrained by the bigger picture, learning and evaluation can help us illuminate that picture and help us determine whether we are making progress within the limited frame that we are able to impact.
Defining social justice: As developmental evaluators we are well-positioned to have in-depth conversations about what our partners mean by social justice. It’s inevitable that a complex term will have a range of meanings for people. Getting everyone in a room to articulate how they understand social justice, how they think the organization is contributing to or working against it, and coming to a common understanding of how to continuously inform practice in relation to supporting social justice is crucial. These definitions may come in many forms, but a useful one to keep in mind is to ground the group in their collective, guiding principles. These guiding principles should articulate the foundation of what a group cares about needs to be broadly applied in how we care, think and act. 
Connecting everyday action to a social justice strategy: That being said, having one conversation about the meaning of social justice and thinking that there is a clear path forward is unrealistic to say the least. As developmental evaluators it is not our job to have all of the answers, but it is our job to keep asking questions: questions about how our everyday practice relates to the values and strategies that we and our partners have laid out; questions about how what we’re learning should change how we live those values and implement those strategies; and questions about what is possible in claims around progress. None of these questions will have ready answers but it is our responsibility to keep that conversation going.
Holding a mirror up for each other: As developmental evaluators, embedded within organizations, we have the opportunity to explore how an organizations programs or services are working to support social justice issues but also how the organization is living its values of social justice. Focusing part of our evaluation efforts on how organizational culture, power structures, and practice is supporting what its outward programs or services are aiming to support can be a powerful way of making a change from the outside in. It’s also a way of making sure that the caring is personal. It’s not about what we “do” at work but it’s how we strive to think, care and act as human beings.
As a trusted member of a team, the developmental evaluator is also in a position to pose critical questions about the assumptions we’re making as individuals or at the organizational level. When we consistently ask people to question their assumptions and articulate how their everyday practice links to their caring, they begin to do that for each other and themselves.
Acknowledging unhelpful evaluation practices: As developmental evaluators, we have to be aware of the evaluation practices that actually undermine our own capacity to support socially just efforts. I can’t do better than Vu Le’s exploration of this topic and encourage everyone to read his piece in full. But in short, the voices that we choose to privilege as evaluators, the way that we define credible data and define effectiveness on behalf of others; all have enormous implications for how we’re supporting or undermining efforts to support social justice.
Actively seeking to understand the contexts that we work in as broadly as possible; include diverse voices in our definitions of progress and understanding of the context are essential.
Supporting a broad capacity for learning: Lastly, developmental evaluators are well-positioned to support individuals’ and organizations’ capacity for adaptive learning. Adaptive learning is all about the capacity to fit our capacities to a context. When we are able to fit our capacities to context, we have power in that situation: we can actua
lly impact it. Our capacity to learn as our situation changes is central to our abilities to play a role in creating or withstanding that change.
All of that being said, we can learn in helpful or unhelpful ways. Our learning can also support justice or injustice. The capacity to direct our learning in a way that gives us the power to impact the level of social justice is crucial. As a developmental evaluator, one of the most powerful things that we can do is empower others’ curiosity and capacity for learning so that the way we’re thinking, acting and caring in the world is grounded in a continuous attempt to understand reality (in all of their nested, complex glory) and our collective and individual blind spots.