Rooting for Change: Exploring What’s Next

By Sonia Taddy-Sandino and Clare Nolan

As we come to the end of another busy year, we’ve been reflecting on the many sources of energy and wisdom that have fueled our work and inspired our vision and aspirations for the future.

This year, we celebrated our five-year anniversary and gathered in person for a team retreat for the first time in more than two years. It was pure joy to break free from our Zoom boxes and start our retreat with the ancient art of Tai Chi under the towering presence of oak trees. The ocean breeze and the magnetic energy of connection were magical.

Anniversaries and year-end reflections are always a great time to take stock and express gratitude, especially after weathering many storms. It seems fitting that wood and trees are elements for commemorating five-year anniversaries - a symbol of durability, wisdom, and strong roots. As founders of Engage R+D, we have been reflecting on that metaphor of wood and what durability means in the context of our work. As we end 2022, those reflections are also catalysts for the future. 

Staying rooted in our values as we strive for the world we want

At Engage R+D, we continually seek to learn from others and elevate how community partners, foundations, and organizations we work with are striving to cultivate healing, trust, and equity in their relationships and social change efforts. For example, as part of our work with The James Irvine Foundation, we released a case study about  Fresno DRIVE, a bold cross-sector partnership paving the way to an inclusive economic recovery by centering racial equity. We also captured field insights about “Shifting Philanthropic Practice in Times of Crisis” as part of an evaluation of The California Endowment’s COVID-19 rapid response grantmaking. Finally, we also collaborated with DISH supportive housing residents and La Cocina women entrepreneurs to conduct a participatory evaluation of an innovative food program that advances both health and economic equity.

Every day presents new opportunities to live into our values and demonstrate our commitment to advancing racial equity, social justice, and inclusion. This is both why and how we do our work, which means we too need to examine our practices and model more equitable ways of working each and every day.

Cultivating and tending to the forest 

As Peter Wohlleben writes in The Hidden Life of Trees, “a tree is not a forest” and “on its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It's at the mercy of wind and weather.” Other luminaries like adrienne maree brown (author of Emergent Strategy) also continue to remind us to listen and learn from the wisdom, resilience, and interconnectedness of our natural environment.

Trees and the larger forest serve as a metaphor for connection and cultivating authentic relationships, another one of our core organizational values. Trees need each other to cross-pollinate and, according to Robin Wall Kimmerer (Indigenous botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass), they too have their own way of connecting and creating community. Trust, connection, and sense of community create the fertile ground we need for shared learning and collaboration. In 2022, we had the privilege of working with several communities of practice and sharing what we’re learning about the power of convening partners with a shared appetite for transformative change. As part of a community of practice for youth advocacy organizations, our team also shared insights about how to engage participants in co-design and ensure they drive and lead the community.

We were excited to join the evaluation community at the annual American Evaluation Association conference in New Orleans this fall. In addition to learning from our peers, several members of our team seeded ideas and shared insights on trauma-informed, participatory, and community-centered approaches to evaluation and learning. 

Stretching, growing, and reaching new heights 

In our Meet Our Partners series, leaders in the fields of philanthropy and evaluation shared their reflections on what’s urgent and what’s next. We were struck by calls for foundations to deepen their efforts to share and shift power to communities and invest in their capacity to harness evaluation and learning. Partners also talked about the critical role evaluators can play in helping to advance racial justice by helping those who hold power understand the realities of what it takes to support long-term systemic change and to reframe conceptions of what progress looks like in this context.

We see learning - stretching -  as critical to advancing justice and aspire to build and share knowledge alongside others. We also value experimentation, curiosity, and practices that challenge the status quo. This means pushing ourselves, breaking new ground, and being willing to do hard things. We continuously seek to amplify how field partners are testing and learning by sharing useful tools and actionable insights to help others do their best work. For example, earlier this year we created a field guide to help learning and evaluation leaders working in philanthropy navigate their dynamic and complex roles along with a companion guide for CEOs.  

We are proud of our progress over the last five years and are as rooted and passionate as ever to continue to stretch ourselves in the years to come.  In 2023, we look forward to sharing plans and announcements about how we are practicing our values as an organization (stay tuned!). Until then, we wish you a joyful and restorative holiday season.