In 2023, the Center for Women’s Leadership will celebrate 20 years of our flagship program, NEW Leadership™ Oregon. The anniversary offers an opportunity to evaluate NLO—to understand its impact on its 600+ alums and how to grow our program in a way that centers participant needs.
Our evaluation methodology included a comprehensive survey of alums served from 2003 to 2021. As a team dedicated to racial and intersectional gender justice, we were particularly interested in whether/how participants’ experiences varied across identities. Rather than isolating just one identity, we created interactive charts that would assess participant experience by intersectional identity, such as race and gender. We also gathered data at NLO 2022.
This evaluation is part of us practicing our core values, in particular:
- Accountability: We learn from our mistakes—when we cause harm, we strive to hold ourselves accountable, repair the harm, and change our behavior moving forward.
- Belonging. We want a world where everyone belongs, so we practice cultivating belonging in our programs. Belonging is both cultural and structural. It is a felt sense–either experienced or not, based on how we treat each other—and it is how we structure…everything.
One finding that we want to highlight is that female participants rated their NLO experience higher than nonbinary participants, and nonbinary participants reported more barriers to participation than female participants. Respondents also shared incidents of harm that reflect transphobia, racism, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and anti-Blackness. In 2022 and moving forward, we have made shifts to addressing this harm by:
- Supporting the most gender-inclusive NLO cohort to date. 17% NLO 2022 identified as nonbinary or gender expansive.
- Practicing Black, Indigenous, and People of Color affinity and white learning spaces for racial justice during NLO.
- Centering the identities of the people most impacted in our program. We prioritize NLO applicants who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; trans, queer, nonbinary, or gender-expansive; low-income; Disabled or having a disability; or hold any other marginalized identity.
- Focusing NLO itself on leadership based in equity, antiracism, and community.
- Evaluating NLO from an equity lens by:
- disaggregating NLO experience, effects, and barriers based on identity, such as race/gender/education level/disability.
- comparing NLO evaluation findings based on demographics and over time
- centering participatory and nondominant methods in evaluation practices whenever possible, such as with our arts-based evaluation.
- Organizing a series of NLO alum roundtables to collaborate and co-design future NLO programming with alums who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, as well as alums who identify as nonbinary or gender expansive.
Reducing barriers to NLO to be lower than the average of all years of the program’s history, as well as the last nine years of in-person NLO (see the graph below). We now cover all expenses, including food and lodging, and provide stipends to reduce barriers in transportation, caregiving needs, and loss of livelihood to improve access.
Our evaluation lens is fluid and ever-changing, based on intersectional feminism, and recognizes the existence of white supremacy in dominant notions of 'truth,' 'objectivity,' and 'evidence.' We think of evaluation as a never-ending process, and we don't want it to, as we always want to be listening, learning, and helping our programs grow. We recognize that numbers cannot capture a person's lived experience. Our hope is that these interactive data visualizations and arts-based evaluation practices help make our findings accessible and meaningful to the NLO community. We hope you enjoy exploring them.