¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc.: Design principles for recentering social justice in evaluation training and disrupting whiteness and neoliberalism

Abstract

AbstractAcross the nation, the American Evaluation Association (AEA) recognizes over thirty volunteer‐led organizations called local affiliates. These affiliates provide professional development, networking, and field building opportunities that influence the local evaluation marketplace and ecosystem in ways that have not been systematically studied or understood within the larger discourse of continuing education for evaluators. In this chapter, we present a single case study on the long‐term efforts of ¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Inc., the AEA Local Affiliate in Wisconsin, to recenter social justice in evaluator training and education. The case study is presented in the form of two design principles that have shaped the affiliate's work over the past 10 years and helped move the local evaluation marketplace and infrastructure toward deeper expressions of social justice. The affiliate uses a two‐generation approach, creates liminal spaces as the site for critical consciousness raising and emancipatory capacity building, validates (working class) evaluators of color, and covers topics such as reparations and neoliberalism in its educational offerings. The rationale for this approach is discussed.