Evaluation to build power with artists and communities of color

Abstract Information: Learning and evaluation at The Center for Cultural Power centers BIPOC artists from historically marginalized communities. Cultural Power builds power with BIPOC artists and culture bearers to envision and build a just world. Our evaluations design tools and frameworks to understand our programs’ impacts on artists and culture bearers: we develop and measure key indicators of how our programs grow their capacity to continue on in their fields, tell the stories they want to tell in their work, and contribute to broader cultural and narrative change. In this paper, we explore and seek to workshop our methods with fellow practitioners through two related case studies evaluating supports for artists and their broader impact on cultural and narrative change: one on a fellowship for emerging screenwriters of color who also identify as trans or nonbinary, disabled, and/or undocumented or formerly undocumented; and the second on testing audience reactions to artists’ work and sharing back these learnings with artists in migrant and reproductive justice work. These two case studies paint a picture of how we are evaluating the infrastructure for narrative and culture change that Cultural Power is building: first, by how the programs support and build the power of artists; and second, by understanding how the stories these artists put forth shift audience worldviews, and using this understanding to build artists’ capacity to effect social change. In designing these evaluations, we foreground questions of: 1) how can we ensure that the metrics we design reflect what BIPOC artists know to be formative to their trajectories? 2) how can we design culturally responsive and equitable evaluations with artists and collect data in ways that are accessible for, connect with, and add value for the artists we engage with so that we co-create metrics and learnings that have value for all involved? And 3) how can we develop insights and recommendations for artist programs and funders to support artists’ ability to do work that engages with social change? We will explore the methods we have experimented with to address these questions, including participatory and arts-based methods, audience response testing, and measuring fellowship participants’ professional development, community-building, confidence in their work and trajectories, and the cumulative effects of being in an environment with like-minded others who share their values on their abilities to do their best creative work, sustain themselves, and break into their fields. We invite conversation on how we can continue to iterate our methods. We are working in and contributing to developing an emerging area of practice: impact and evaluation work with BIPOC artists in cultural and narrative change. As we build this field of inquiry, we believe that centering the emerging perspectives and experiences of artists and cultural creators from historically marginalized communities to understand their challenges, visions for their work, and the powerful contributions they make to cultural and narrative change when they have the structural supports they need, is critical to changing culture and making evaluation in this space more equitable.