Meet the Team: Qiana Davis
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Our Meet the Team blog series give you a glimpse into our team members' approach to working with our partners to achieve better results for communities. Today we’re getting to know research consultant Qiana Davis.
1. What is your role at Engage R+D?
I am a Research Consultant, which can mean a lot of things. It’s a really flexible role and my job varies depending on the day, the project, and the client. I might design surveys and analyze data one day, connect with community members for interviews the next, and then co-facilitate a community of practice with nonprofit leaders another day. It’s exciting and interesting work.
2. What experience do you bring to this work?
My background includes two different but related career paths prior to evaluation. I started as a “macro social work practitioner” leading programs focused on child abuse prevention, food insecurity, housing insecurity, and mental health. When people hear the term social worker, they assume someone is working directly with an individual, a young person, or a family, which is at the micro level of social work practice. While micro social work is incredibly important, macro social work practice is the application of social work values, knowledge, and skills to organizations, communities, and systems. My social work values drive my work regardless of the setting and influence how I approach my role as an evaluator. I feel it’s definitely aligned with our developmental approach to evaluation at Engage R+D because we value people and the knowledge and assets they bring to this process. Also, we work to cultivate authentic relationships and build trust to help us learn together. When clients or community members share information to support learning, we check and double check to ensure that we synthesize and share the information in a manner that honors the information they have entrusted us with. It’s also embedded in the way we co-create tools, how we collect and analyze data, and the way we use tools and information.
I also have worked in higher education as a leader of college access and student success programs. As an assistant dean at a four-year, public, minority-serving institution, I was immersed in work focused on addressing institutional barriers to student success and working to achieve equitable student outcomes. I now apply my higher ed practitioner knowledge to my work as an evaluation professional. I currently work on some higher education projects where I am able to apply my experiences to working within a large system. It helps me to have an awareness and empathy for some of the challenges practitioners face as they work in support of systems change and program implementation. I don’t know their lived experiences but I can understand that there are so many factors influencing decision making and the way people are able to show up in spaces. It shows up on so many projects that I have experiences from my previous career paths which I can apply and where I can consider factors from a different perspective that helps deepen understanding. I also hope it adds value to the team.
3. Can you share something that motivates you?
When I came to Engage R+D, I recall a client where we were able to conduct a series of interviews with partners of a foundation engaging in regional systems change work. When we shared our findings from the interviews related to a particular aspect of their strategy that was less effective, the client was responsive to our recommendation and made a swift pivot in their strategy. They were working in a community where some of my family resides which made the shift particularly meaningful. We spent hours speaking with people, reading and analyzing what they shared, and figuring out how to tell a story that reflected their perspectives. I know that people are skeptical of the time they invest in speaking with evaluators. You have to earn the trust of people you are interviewing, be honorable and respectful, and truly represent their priorities. To see that work yield results and have the client really pivot was incredibly rewarding.
4. What do you love about your job?
It’s definitely the people. Now more than ever, with working from home and re-examining work-life balance, something that resonates with me is that the people you interact with every day play a major role in shaping your experience. I accept responsibility for what I am supposed to do, but it’s also great to work with people whose values are aligned. We are truly a team. Not that we all think the same; we shouldn’t. But, we want a quality product, to drive change, and to be a part of a team that genuinely cares about one another. It’s inspiring. The dynamic is similar to how we work with clients. I learn things every day; clients teach us things and so do their grantees. All of this knowledge sharing and exchange every day makes this so worthwhile.
5. How are you taking care of yourself these days?
You wouldn’t know by my nails right now but setting aside time to do things, like getting a manicure or pedicure, or just taking a few minutes to pause without staring at a screen or answering anyone’s questions are ways I’m taking care of myself. And cooking! Evaluation projects can go on for multiple years. You are in it over a very long haul, and this deep work is never really finished, much like social work. In cooking you have a recipe, and there’s a start and a finish, you add these different things to the mix, and you can predict your end product. I understand that as a human I need to have that predictability. So I cook!
