The long game: Further thoughts
I finally got around to reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s book Emergent Strategy. Not surprisingly, much of it resonated with me, both personally and professionally with the work of Luminare Group and the Equitable Evaluation Initiative. What is sitting most deeply at the moment is the section about imagination:
Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity. (pg. 163-164)
AMB talks about afrofuturism and black people in particular. I am with her. I am also thinking about how our collective concept of knowledge is colonized. It shows up in many ways, but one way is the current evaluation paradigm. It limits. It reduces. It simplifies. It decontextualizes. It no longer serves the world many of us hope will be the future. It lacks imagination. It is stuck. Stuck in the past.
I want to be free of it.
We need to better describe, document, and demonstrate what is happening/happened in relation to our intentions. We need to get comfortable with contributing to not causing. The focus on the latter reflects an ego driven mindset grounded in a medical model, with little relevance to much of the social and systems change work in which many foundations and nonprofits are engaged.
We need to understand, for whom, under what conditions, and in what ways our evaluation reflects and advances efforts towards equity, justice, and liberation. Otherwise, what are we really doing? The world is suffering. We are suffering.
If you are tired of feeling trapped and ready to embrace possibilities (intentionally plural), then I invite you to begin by exploring what you think you know and why.
Recognizing your truth is simply that: yours. It is not the most important truth, nor the only truth.
Imagine what we might know if that was our norm, and even within that frame, if we got much more comfortable with not knowing.
See here for earlier writing on playing the long game.
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About The Author:
Jara Dean-Coffey (jdc) is Founder and Director of the Equitable Evaluation Initiative and the Founder of Luminare Group. For the past twenty-five years, she has partnered with clients and colleagues to elevate their collective understanding of the relationship between values, context, strategy and evaluation and shifting our practices so that they are more fully in service of equity. For more about musings + machinations click here.
