Our Commitment to Equity

Equity is the condition of fair and just opportunities for all people to participate and thrive in society regardless of individual or group identity or difference. Through our commitment to equity CCHE seeks to improve the way we collaborate with partners and the impact of our work. We make our social justice and equity values explicit.

The Center for Community Health and Evaluation stands against all forms of injustice and discrimination, and we remain dedicated to achieving equity and inclusion for all. This principle is core to our mission to improve the health of communities through collaborative approaches to planning, assessment, and evaluation.

Since our earliest evaluations, our work at CCHE has addressed issues of social justice and equity because so many community health outcomes are the living legacies of systemic injustices and inequities. At CCHE we are on a collective journey to strengthen how we put our commitment to equity in action. The field of evaluation has been and is still part of systems that can perpetuate inequities unless we change the paradigm. We recognize that serving as an evaluator puts us in a position of power. We should use the power we have for good: for questioning how power is allocated in the contexts and communities of programs we evaluate, what success looks like, what is valued and by whom, what should be measured, who speaks, who listens, and who decides.

To evolve our evaluation practice to be a stronger force for equity, we must push not only ourselves but our partners and funders, beyond our respective comfort zones, to reflect as individuals and as organizations on what it means to design and implement equitable evaluation practices. In addition to structured reflection on equity, diversity, and inclusion, with each other and with partners, we actively develop and refine tools and methods for holding ourselves accountable to equitable organizational and evaluation practices.