Meet Our Partners: Hugh Vasquez
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Engage R+D turns five years old this year. And to celebrate this milestone, we’re reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning, where we’ve collectively made strides, and what the future looks like. To help us think through what comes next for the fields of philanthropy and evaluation, we are highlighting voices of our partners – both funders and nonprofit leaders charting the path forward. First up is Hugh Vasquez of National Equity Project, where he’s been embedding equity in organizational work for the past several decades.
Tell us about your role and the issues you seek to address through your work.
I am a senior associate at National Equity Project. Our work is to build leaders who understand how we can create the will, skill, and knowledge to address inequities in government, health care, and education systems. Getting them to see the inequities that are going on and take leadership to first understand what is happening and figure out how to take action to respond to challenges around race and racial equity.
For decades I thought we were making progress on equity. However, over the last 5 years, those who were underground for decades have come above ground, and they are representative of a resistance to equity. Some talk about it as a backlash, but I see it as a resurfacing of beliefs and mindsets that have been under the surface. We don’t yet have a country where there is a belief in shared faith or linked fate across differences. We don’t share a belief in common humanity. We have made progress but not enough momentum yet for unstoppable change where we see each other as human to human.
In what ways has learning and evaluation contributed to your work?
Learning and evaluation causes us to look at impact in ways that we typically don't. Evaluation has been critical in stopping us from doing things and really looking at the impact of what we do. Developing the skill, knowledge of leaders – evaluation has us pause to see what we think we are doing to develop those things, and if it’s really happening.
I've learned you can evaluate to see if you did something and stop there: check the box, I did it. Evaluation at Engage R+D, they say, not only did you do it but did it develop or start something happening that wasn't happening before? Did you move people in their awareness and learning, and did that actually change something? Evaluation has given us a way to look at our impact.
What shifts are you seeing in evaluation and/or philanthropy and what promise do those hold?
The shift that I see is a whole lot more ownership and partnership of the problem of inequities. Both evaluation and philanthropy want to partner. George Floyd’s murder catalyzed this. Philanthropy in particular said, “We can’t be bystanders anymore.”
At the same time, if we are not careful, it will be a temporary shift. I’ve already seen philanthropy drop interest in working toward equity. It was on high activation and now it’s on middle activation; it has lowered. There was a burst and then it slowed down.
Good evaluation is shifting equity from a fad to an every day practice. Philanthropy needs to see that equity work needs to be embedded. Where we are working with Engage R+D, the partnership between program and evaluation goes hand in hand. We are step in step with each other to keep the momentum going and the activation high. Evaluation is helping to do that – motivation, activation, bringing in stories and data, showing the impact of what is happening with the equity work we and others are doing, and helping to keep people activated.
What do you hope to see shift even more and what might it take to get there?
If I think about philanthropy, it’s a mindset shift that says: “This is our problem to solve, and we have to keep working at it even though we don’t know exactly what to do about it.” If there’s not a sense of progress or impact almost immediately, many foundations give up and move onto something else. They have to stay with it until the problem is solved, instead of turning away from it when they don’t see progress.
“It’s not looking at if your impact was successful, but was your impact moving in the right direction? If yes, keep going.”
Evaluation is redefining what impact means and on what timeline. We are working in the realm of complexity. The problem is unknown - how we are going to produce equity in the world around us. We don’t know what the key is to shift mindsets into believing we are one people. If we knew how to do that, we wouldn’t have the disparities that we have. We are trying to move in the right direction for equity to be produced. If we are doing that, that’s success. Keeping moving in the right direction is important. We need to shift how evaluation works in this context. It’s not looking at if your impact was successful, but was your impact moving in the right direction? If yes, keep going.
Schools are a good example of this. When we look at how we assess schools and evaluate success in school systems, people often look at GPA, or do students get into a college, or how many people came to class today. Rarely are we saying: “Did students learn today?” So if you translate that to equity, it would be, what progress did we make toward equity in our world today? If evaluation was asking that question, and if philanthropy was funding based on progress and direction toward equity, there would be long-term initiatives and robust funding, and we’d be adjusting all along based on data.
Follow Hugh on Twitter at @hughjvasquez
