Closing Plenary Session: Cultivating Curiosity: Collective Reflection and Leading the Future of Evaluation

As EVALUATION 2025 draws to a close, we gather to reflect on what we've learned, where we've grown, and how we will carry the theme of Engaging Communities, Sharing Leadership forward. This is not just a panel—it is a pause, a practice, an honoring, and a provocation. Drawing on traditions of metaevaluation, liberatory praxis, and oral history, four powerful voices in our field—Libby Smith, Tiffany Tovey, Angelicque Tucker Blackmon, and Ayesha Boyce—will explore how evaluators can co-create meaning with communities, interrogate systems of oppression, and reflect on our own assumptions and practices. Together, we will turn the mirror inward, exploring critical questions: How do we honor legacy and accountability while moving toward transformative, community-anchored practice? What does it mean to "evaluate ourselves" as a field? Panelists will reflect on their conference experiences and offer insights into how we—as individuals and as a field—might walk differently into the future. You are invited to show up not just as a practitioner, but as a learner, a listener, a co-creator of what comes next.