Meet Our Partners: Jennifer Ito
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Engage R+D turns five this year. To celebrate 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.
Jennifer Ito is the Research Director at the University of Southern California (USC) Equity Research Institute (ERI), where she conducts research primarily on issues of regional inclusion and social movement building. Before joining USC, she worked for a decade in varied capacities at Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE), a grassroots organizing and movement building organization based in South Los Angeles.
Can you talk about your role and the issues you work to address?
I am the research director with the Equity Research Institute at USC, where I have been for the past 12 years. We focus on three areas of research: inclusive economies and climate equity, immigrant inclusion and racial justice, and social movements and governing power. Our tagline “data and analysis to power social change” succinctly defines what we do.
In what ways has learning and evaluation contributed to your work?
We are often asked to play the role of evaluators though we are researchers and not evaluators. We apply our research methods to evaluation projects because data combined with a narrative can be critical in supporting dialogue towards shared understanding, learning, and co-strategizing between evaluators, foundations, movement builders, and capacity builders. Such dialogue and learning is needed in these times when people are recognizing that the strategies from the past are not the ones that will move us forward.
In the movement-building field, in particular, we see places where learning and evaluation is happening alongside the exploration of new strategies. It is the experiences and lessons from these leading edges of the field that are important to lift up and to share–and this is where evaluators have a key role to play. The work is often about translating the work into a common language that bridges the gap in understanding between folks that work in different sectors.
What shifts are you seeing in evaluation and/or philanthropy and what promise do those hold?
What I see is a shift from evaluation to learning. This is a shift from being less about shining a light and saying “this is a great program” and more towards a long view inquiry that asks “what can we learn from this program for the next effort?” It’s a good muscle that is being built around a recognition that the work towards equity and justice is long-term and that we don’t have all the answers. Even if we did, contexts and conditions are always changing, so our strategies need to adapt accordingly. A shift I’m seeing in philanthropy that I hope takes greater hold is an approach to longer-term funding with flexibility for grantees to meet changing needs.
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.
There’s a history of data invisibilizing certain communities. The data we frequently use - be it Census data or other public datasets – are not reported for many populations and communities. Furthermore, who is considered an expert or what is considered valid knowledge continues to reinforce the marginalization of groups.
We have to engage in intentional practices to end that cycle and to hold ourselves and each other accountable, especially in the field of research, learning, and evaluation. I see the growing field of equitable evaluation as a step in that direction.
I would also love to see, and I see Engage R+D as part of this, an ecosystem of evaluators who are rooted in grassroots-led movements. There will be independent institutions, like Engage R+D or USC ERI, and also evaluators embedded in movement organizations themselves. I’d like to see investment in building that in-house capacity in movement-building organizations so that the learning and evaluation feeds back into their work, rather than the learning agenda being driven by the questions and interests of their funders.
