Engaging Evaluation Communities, Sharing Leadership: Advancing Professional Practice through AEA’S Foundational Documents

This year’s theme, Engaging Communities, Sharing Leadership, reflects AEA’s commitment to fostering inclusive dialogue, co-creating knowledge, and driving meaningful transformation. The recently formed AEA Foundational Documents Task Force (FDTF), has been charged with the long overdue but necessary work to update 3 of AEA’s foundational documents which frame our professional commitments: AEA Guiding Principles (2018) that articulate core values for ethical conduct, AEA Evaluator Competencies (2018) which identify evaluator knowledge, skills, and attitudes that ground professional practice, and the AEA Public Statement on Cultural Competence (2011) that affirms the centrality of culture in evaluation and identifies culturally competent practices. In this session, task force members want to engage conference participants by sharing FDTF’s efforts to update the 3 foundational documents, and importantly, to gather feedback on proposed ways forward. RATIONALE: Genuine changes require enacting the themes of this year’s conference: • engaging AEA communities to co-create frameworks that value diverse perspectives, current contexts and lived experiences. • facilitating inclusive conversations that lead to transformative action DRIVING QUESTION: How should these 3 foundational documents intersect, overlap, align, and be updated? AEA membership first dialogued collaboratively about all 3 of these documents together during a March 2025 townhall. FDTF members identified emerging themes and challenges from this and other interactions. The current zeitgeist in the US adds greater urgency to our need for action. This face-to-face interactive session will engage participants in discussing insights, implications, and relevance for use and shared understanding. Participants also will consider possible avenues for the FDTF to not only “update” but to identify where to “transform” these documents. A webinar following the conference will enable identifying unifying missions and networking to expand capacity of the FDTF. OUTCOMES: Attendees will engage with FDTF members to: 1. Dialog about challenges to how the AEA Evaluator Competencies (2018), AEA Guiding Principles (2018), AEA Public Statement on Cultural Competence (2011), and Program Evaluation Standards (2010) can be leveraged; 2. Explore implications for individual and collective evaluation practice. 3. Suggest actions for evaluation practitioners, educators, researchers, policy makers, commissioners, foundations, and professional associations to transform these documents to help advance evaluator professionalization. ADVANTAGES: This proposal will support a focus on topics that are relevant to AEA organizationally as well as encourage individual leadership development, time for authentic conversations and actionable teamwork, flexibility of schedule, and an emphasis on contributions from every participant. The relationships built during an interactive session often continue well past the event. The interactions can lead to productive collaborations, using creative conflict to deconstruct polarities, creating professional development opportunities, and networking needed resources. Finally, the format will increase access, allow the inclusion of previously unheard voices who have lacked representation—giving voice in the ongoing co-construction of AEA and the co-exploration of foundational evaluation topics.
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Principal, Evaluation & Development Associates LLC Office of Strategy and Learning Strategic Learning and Evaluation Raya Cooper Impact Consulting Katalyst Innovative Consulting Services