Meet the Team: Giannina Fehler-Cabral
/Our Meet the Team blog series highlights our team, one member at a time. We give you a glimpse into their motivations and approach to working with our partners to achieve better results for communities. Through this feature, we hope that you’ll find a deeper connection to the people and relationships that are central to our work.
Today we’re getting to know Giannina Fehler-Cabral, our passionate and amazing senior consultant at Engage R+D.
1. What is your role at Engage R+D?
I joined Engage R+D in 2019 as a Senior Consultant. My role is to help our clients and community partners understand how to use data and community wisdom as tools to develop stronger, more equitable communities. I have led various community change initiatives that focus on economic mobility, higher education, early childhood, community organizing, and advocacy and system change. While I am trained to design and implement more “traditional evaluations,” I’m particularly excited about shifting the way evaluation and learning is conducted using the Equitable Evaluation Framework. As such, a lot of my work incorporates approaches that center community ownership and engagement in the learning process, developing culturally relevant methods and tools, and facilitating sense-making meetings to help stakeholders reflect and make informed decisions. I also have contributed to operational and organizational practices at Engage R+D such as business development and designing staff retreats.
2. What experience do you bring to this work?
I was always a curious little girl. My nature to question everything, make the final point, and speak up would drive my parents insane, so they thought I would make a good lawyer. When I was about nine, I fell in love with the kids’ question-and-answer book “Tell Me Why #5” and was thrilled when my parents bought us our first set of encyclopedias--you know, the thing people used before Google search. My fascination with the “why” led me to major in psychology to understand human behavior. At the same time, I took an interest in social justice issues and minored in women’s studies, which led me to work in a domestic violence shelter. These experiences made me realize that I wanted to focus on addressing social problems by examining the “isms,” or structures and systems that keep some people from thriving. My mentor at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) introduced me to the field of community psychology and that was my “hallelujah” moment. I never knew psychology had a specialty focused on equity and systems change. After I completed my master’s in psychological research from CSULB, I moved to Lansing, Michigan to obtain my PhD in community psychology from Michigan State University. During those 8 years, I worked on a variety of research and evaluation projects that included community-based participatory and feminist research methods. My primary research focus was on violence against women, and my dissertation examined how the criminal justice system responds to adolescent sexual assault survivors. My post-doc involved working with the Wayne County Prosecutors Office in Detroit on an “Action Research Project” with prosecutors, police, victim advocates, and forensic nurses to examine why thousands of rape kits were left untested. This was the highlight of my academic career as it was one of those rare moments where research and evaluation led to state-wide policy change. This work proved how powerful research and evaluation, through a collaborative model, can be in driving positive change. It also helped me flex my consulting muscles, working with diverse and often adversarial stakeholders. Following my post-doc, I knew my strength was in applied research and evaluation rather than following the academic route. I found my way back to my hometown of Los Angeles, California to become a consultant and never turned back.
3. Tell me about an experience or a story that motivates you to do this work.
Over the last 15+ years, I have learned a great deal from my academic training in mixed methods evaluation and community-based research. I have refined my methodological skills and been able to adapt tools to different evaluation contexts and learning needs. My early training helped me become a skilled qualitative researcher, interviewing numerous girls and women who were physically or sexually assaulted. Listening to traumatic stories of pain and hope truly shape how I interact with people in my consulting work. Over the last seven years of being a consultant, I have strengthened a skillset that is often overlooked in our field—building relationships. Being an active listener, asking questions that promote deep reflection, showing empathy, gently pushing a client by being a “critical friend,” being transparent about what I don’t know, being vulnerable and showing my passion for the work, and connecting culturally with my Latinx community partners has helped me build the trust that I feel is needed to make learning and evaluation meaningful. At Engage R+D, we work alongside our clients and community partners to grapple with some of the toughest social issues. Without relationships built on trust, learning, and evaluation can feel like an extractive and dehumanizing experience.
4. What do you love about your job?
There is so much I love about my job at Engage R+D. First and foremost, the people. My coworkers have become my friends, which is amazing given our virtual environment. We have a deep respect for one another. We value our unique abilities, support one another, and know how to have fun! Together, we help our clients through innovative techniques in learning and evaluation. Our intentional focus on racial equity also keeps me motivated. As an organization, we have been on a “DEI” journey since the beginning, but we are now pushing ourselves into deeper and more uncomfortable conversations. The trust we have built has allowed us to have more honest conversations about race, racism, our personal experiences, and where we want to go as an organization. Finally, I love working with clients and community partners that share the same passion for social justice. I find the greatest fulfillment working closely with community partners, particularly community-based organizations, and engaging them in experiences that elevate insights and actionable steps for their work. Throughout all of this, I lead with humility. I know I have so much more to learn and unlearn to become a better consultant. At Engage R+D, I feel safe showing my vulnerability and breaking down the “perfectionist” mentality that has held me back as an evaluator, researcher, and consultant for many years.
5. You’re in Los Angeles - tell me 3 places I should go if I visit.
I was raised in the South Bay of Los Angeles County, a place known for its beach life and diversity of people, food, and entertainment. If you are ever in this part of Southern California, I recommend the following places to visit:
If you know me, you would know I come from a large entrepreneurial Peruvian family, so of course I would suggest our family’s restaurant El Pollo Inka. There are several locations in the South Bay and we have been around for over 30 years, providing delicious food as well as doing community charity work. Next time you are in town, order a “ceviche de pescado” and any type of “saltado”.
Torrance Beach. I often walk to this calm, family-friendly beach with views of Malaga Cove and cliffs off the Palos Verdes Peninsula. After a full day at the beach, hit the Riviera Village, and enjoy amazing food, drinks, and shopping from local vendors and artists. If you want some more beach excitement, go a few miles north to Redondo Beach Pier and rent a kayak or indulge in live King crab legs from Quality Seafood market in a no-frills environment.
South Coast Botanical Garden. If you are a plant enthusiast like me, you will enjoy walking through this garden located in the Palos Verdes Peninsula. After checking out over 200,000 types of plants and enjoying a nice picnic in one of its expansive lawns, head down to one of many local nurseries, such as Peter’s Garden Center in Redondo Beach or Deep Roots Garden Center in Manhattan Beach, to get your plant fix.
