Contribution, Leadership, and Renewal: Perspective from a Path Less Traveled

My name is A. Rafael Johnson, Vice President and Co-Owner at Inspire to Change. I co-created an initativite and approach, Creative Evaluation and Engagement, with Nora Murphy Johnson. I’m a novelist, and I’d like to tell you a story of how I came to be an evaluator without training as an evaluator.

In 2010 I taught yoga to a blind orphan in Liberia. I’d arrived as a USAID subcontractor. My NGO was charged with helping rebuild the education system after the end of their long civil war. I reduced the national student:textbook ratio from 5 students per textbook to 4, taught classes of former refugees and combatants, and created a service-learning program. All of this went into the quarterly M&E reports. But in my off-hours, I also worked to get homeless former child soldiers to attend a literacy program, helped college staff learn to read, and became the substitute ‘house dad’ at a home for youth repatriated from the refugee camps. That’s where I met Michael, who had lost his sight.

Each week, a specialist would come in to teach the kids a particular skill. One week, I taught them memoir writing. Another week, the house mom taught yoga. So imagine: 8 Liberian youth, practicing yoga in what was once a grand beach home overlooking the Atlantic coast. The house mom modeled poses and called out instructions. Everyone mimicked her except Michael — the vocal instructions didn’t make sense. I moved behind him, took his hands, and moved them into position. I bent his knees, aligned his feet, adjusted his shoulders. We spent a week learning like this until he memorized the entire routine.

There was no place on my M&E report for this — my off hours work was never captured at all. Up until then, I’d seen M&E reports as an inconvenience, but after teaching Michael I saw those reports as a method to control and exclude the narratives of local people in their own country. He didn’t count, in a fundamental way. The thought that I’d helped depower the very people I’d come to help sickened me. I left Liberia six months later.

Back in the States, I was recruited to join an evaluation firm. I refused. As far as I was concerned, evaluation put people’s lives in little boxes and cut off anything that didn’t fit into a pre-conceived narrative. But I agreed to edit a report and then learned about developmental evaluation, principles-focused evaluation, and arts-based methods. Nora Murphy Johnson and I combined these into something we call Creative Evaluation and Engagement, which works for real people and real situations, and co-creates learning and measures of success with people, not for people. This style of evaluation considers the total person, organization, and/or community and works towards telling their whole story — even the parts a funder finds inconvenient. Telling the story of people’s lives in all their messy glory, hands-on, fully engaged — this is the kind of work that feels right to me.

P.S. The last I heard, Michael runs a popular beach yoga business.

See the original post on the AEA365 blog: https://aea365.org/blog/contribution-leadership-and-renewal-perspective-from-a-path-less-traveled-by-a-rafael-johnson/