Rethinking Evaluation: Measuring Progress on Liberatory Goals

After decades of work with foundations, non-profits, and community organizations, I've witnessed countless evaluation frameworks come and go. The most persistent challenge remains: how do we meaningfully assess progress toward liberation when conventional metrics often reinforce the very systems we aim to transform? This isn't merely a technical question—it's a fundamental rethinking of what constitutes success and who gets to define it.

The Limitations of Traditional Evaluation

Conventional evaluation approaches often fall short when measuring liberatory goals because they were designed within—and perpetuate—colonial, capitalist, and white supremacist frameworks. These traditional approaches typically:

• Prioritize quantifiable outcomes over relational and systemic change

• Center funder priorities rather than community expertise

• Value efficiency over depth of transformation

• Focus on individual change rather than collective power-building

• Measure what's easy to count rather than what truly matters

• Demand certainty in contexts where complexity and emergence are essential

These limitations don't just create inadequate assessments—they actively undermine liberatory work by redirecting organizations toward outcomes that don't reflect community priorities or transformative goals.

Principles for Liberatory Evaluation

Reimagining evaluation requires more than technical adjustments. It demands fundamentally different principles that align with liberation:

1. Shift Evaluative Authority

A liberatory approach transfers the power to determine what constitutes success to those most directly impacted by the issues being addressed. This means:

• Communities define indicators of meaningful change

• Evaluation processes are designed with, not for, impacted communities

• Success is measured against community-determined goals, not external benchmarks

• Evaluation processes build community capacity and power

When a health justice coalition I worked with transferred evaluative authority to directly impacted community members, their metrics shifted dramatically—focusing on changes in community agency rather than merely service delivery statistics.

2. Center Relationships and Process

Liberation emerges through transformed relationships and processes, not just outcomes. Liberatory evaluation must examine:

• How decisions are made, not just what is decided

• The quality of relationships being built

• Shifts in power dynamics over time

• The alignment between organizational practice and stated values

One organization I advised developed "process metrics" tracking how community voices influenced decisions, creating accountability for power-sharing practices rather than measuring only programmatic outcomes.

3. Embrace Complexity and Emergence

Unlike tightly controlled interventions, liberatory work operates in complex adaptive systems where change is emergent and nonlinear. Evaluation approaches must:

• Use developmental evaluation principles that accommodate emerging strategies

• Track ripple effects and unintended consequences

• Embrace uncertainty as a site of potential rather than a problem to solve

• Document learning and adaptation as success markers themselves

4. Value Multiple Ways of Knowing

Liberatory evaluation recognizes that data comes in many forms beyond statistics and formal research:

• Story and narrative as valid evidence

• Cultural and ancestral wisdom as essential knowledge

• Emotional and embodied indicators of change

• Collective memory and community documentation

A trauma recovery center I consulted with integrated healing narratives alongside clinical measures, recognizing that liberation from trauma manifests in ways that standardized assessments often miss.

5. Measure Structural and Systemic Change

While individual outcomes matter, liberation requires transformation of systems and structures. Evaluation must track:

• Shifts in policies and institutional practices

• Redistribution of resources and decision-making power

• Changes in narratives and cultural norms

• Growth of collective power among marginalized communities

Practical Approaches to Liberatory Evaluation

Transitioning toward liberatory evaluation practices isn't abstract theory—it requires concrete methodologies:

Participatory Evaluation Design

Involve community members as co-designers and co-implementers of evaluation, not merely as data sources. This includes compensating community evaluators, building evaluation capacity, and transferring evaluative authority.

Values-Aligned Methods

Select methodologies that reflect liberatory values. Approaches like Most Significant Change, Outcome Harvesting, and Ripple Effect Mapping center community perspectives and accommodate emergent outcomes.

Power Analysis

Incorporate ongoing analysis of how power operates within systems and how it shifts over time as a central evaluation question. Map where decisions are made and how community influence has changed.

Learning-Centered Documentation

Replace rigid reporting structures with processes that capture learning, adaptation, and emergent strategy. Create reflection practices that inform real-time adjustments rather than merely documenting past activities.

Navigating Tensions and Challenges

Organizations committed to liberatory evaluation must navigate significant challenges:

• Funder requirements that may conflict with community-centered approaches

• The longer timeframes required for meaningful systemic change

• The difficulty of articulating complex transformation in digestible formats

• Internal resistance to evaluation approaches that feel unfamiliar or risky

These tensions require strategic negotiation rather than simple resolution. Organizations can gradually build funder understanding through education and evidence gathering, while developing parallel evaluation systems that serve both external requirements and internal liberatory goals.

Evaluation as Liberatory Practice

At its best, evaluation itself becomes a liberatory practice—building power, centering marginalized voices, and creating systems of accountability to those most impacted by injustice. By reimagining what we measure and how we measure it, we ensure that our assessment processes strengthen rather than undermine our commitments to justice and transformation.

The path toward liberatory evaluation isn't about perfection—it's about alignment. When our methods of determining success reflect the values we espouse and the futures we envision, evaluation becomes not just a tool for measurement but a practice of liberation itself.