How might Creative Evaluation and Engagement help you in your work?: Part 1 in the CE&E Theory Study Series

By Janeen Manuel, PhD and Nora F. Murphy Johnson, PhD

What drives you in your work as a changemaker? How do/could Creative Evaluation and Engagement practices help you in your work? These are two of the questions we are asking changemakers in our newly launched study, “Understanding How Purpose-Driven Changemakers Use Creative Evaluation and Engagement (CE&E) in Practice.”

After years of working with evaluators, social justice organizations, and individual changemakers, we at Inspire to Change developed Creative Evaluation and Engagement (CE&E) as a way to make progress toward a whole, beautiful, and just world. CE&E is a principles-focused, arts-infused, developmental evaluation practice that we outlined in our recent book, Creative Evaluation and Engagement, Vol 1: Essentials (Murphy Johnson & Johnson, 2022).

Now that the essential elements of CE&E have been detailed and distributed, we have decided to collect data to understand how purpose-driven changemakers use CE&E in their practices, and what motivates them to do so. We hope to provide an evidence base for CE&E theory by conducting numerous short interviews with changemakers (including evaluators, social justice workers, and artists) to determine their reasons for using CE&E in their work, how they utilize the essential elements of CE&E, and what inspires them in their work toward a more whole, beautiful, and just world.

We are at the early stages of this work, but the interviews we’ve conducted so far have been enlightening. We’re so grateful and inspired by all of the changemakers out there who are dedicated to making the world a better place. In the coming weeks, we hope to share some of the results of this study so you can see what inspires changemakers in their own words, and how they have begun to use CE&E in their work. Stay tuned!