We ascribe and aspire to equitable evaluation, a growing movement defined by the Center for Evaluation Innovation as “using evaluation as a tool for advancing equity, involving diversity of teams and cultural appropriateness of methods that reveal drivers of inequity and empower those more affected by the work to shape and own how evaluation happens.”
Apex is developing an approach to equitable evaluation called Systems Learning™, born of our positionality, rooted in systems thinking, and optimized for equity and learning. Systems Learning™ is based on the premise and belief that stories are not merely enhancements that are essential to evaluation, but rather that all of evaluation is the act of storytelling. We see our job as equitable evaluators as producing more authentic, more compelling, and more impactful stories using credible evidence – credibility that comes not from numbers, but from the testimony of witnesses closest to the ground.
Our portfolio is focused entirely on equity work and we align ourselves with organizations and programs addressing the wicked problems of poverty and income inequality, health and education disparities, and racism and discrimination.
We believe that evaluation works best when in service of learning and equity and when it engages and is responsive to an inclusive set of perspectives, including those who hold decision-making power, those doing the work in the field, and those most affected by the work. Inclusion of these three essential perspectives encourages us to pose better questions, to more accurately acknowledge discrepancies in our collective knowledge, and to co-create more accessible, meaningful, and useful theories of change, data collection tools, and implementation plans.
Equity is embedded in all that we do at Apex, from business practices to our evaluation approach. This is what humility looks like in our work – maintaining a healthy boundary between our expertise in systems thinking and evaluation, the subject matter expertise of those we work alongside in the field, and the perspectives of the populations we serve. It fosters the humility and wisdom needed for shared and actionable learning.
