Summer 2024 Checkin
Dear friends, colleagues, and partners,
We hope you're staying cool during these scorching weeks of summer, and that you're finding time for rest, relaxation, and space for connecting with those you care about.
The value of relationships is front and center for us, as we come off a project with College Futures Foundation that was defined by collaboration. Below, we share some of the results of that work, including a range of stories from grantees that speak deeply to the critical importance of the work College Futures Foundation does.
Working with our partners at College Futures Foundation also gave us a chance to reflect on the process of evaluation itself, and how equity can be centered. Tiffany Smith, from the C&P team, writes on that this month - we hope you'll check it out and that the resources will be helpful in your own work.
And finally, we've got a round-up of reading recommendations for you, curated by the C&P team.
We're always excited to hear about your projects, so please drop us a line and let us know what you're up to!
With all best wishes,
Sheryl E. Lane & Maya Paley
Cities & People Advisors
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
College Futures Foundation
We recently completed a large scale strategic learning and evaluation project with College Futures Foundation to assess the impact of their grantmaking strategy on their policy and advocacy grantees, offering them feedback throughout the project timeline.
In addition to the internal sharings with College Futures Foundation, the project culminated in 2 public facing offerings: a published report on their grantmaking strategy, and a compendium of bright spot stories of collaboration among their grantees over the past four years, desired by and provided to the grantees for their use in fundraising, storytelling, and historical chronicling. The participation of the Advisory Committee of various grantee representatives supported the process.
“Learning the stories of the policy ecosystem grantee cohort and seeing all that they have collectively achieved over the past 4 years is a testament to the strength of the higher education equity movement in California. College Futures Foundation has been instrumental in supporting and uplifting that movement to enhance collaboration and impact on all levels.”
– Maya Paley, Project Lead
A huge thank you to College Futures Foundation for bringing us into your community. We especially thank Ria Sengupta Bhatt and Theresa Esparrago Lieu for your thoughtful partnership with us! Thank you to Tanya Moore for your support with bringing us into the space, and to Williams Group for the beautiful designs.
WHAT WE'VE NOTICED
Equitable Evaluation
This month, Tiffany Smith brings us a deep dive on evaluation and equity, exploring the lens we bring to assessments. She writes:
Evaluation has been known as a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using data to examine the effectiveness and efficiency of programs and to contribute to continuous program improvement. Traditional evaluation has not historically centered equity and has operated with their beliefs that evaluative practices are neutral and objective, which is now known not to be possible.
Equity in evaluation means equity is not a step in the process or a set of questions to include in a data collection tool; it is the way evaluation is designed and carried out from design, implementation, analysis, and reporting.
TOP PICKS FROM OUR TEAM
Cities & People Recommends
We surveyed our team to collect a variety of top recommendations for impactful stories, books, podcasts, articles, and more - we hope that you enjoy these as much as we have. Please send us your favorites, too; we'd love to know what's been inspiring, entertaining, and educating you!
ON WORKING TOO HARD
Ambition Monster: A Memoir by Jennifer Romolini
The first time it happens, I’m standing on a stage. I’m ten minutes into a speech on “authenticity,” “power,” “finding your path”—the series of platitudes-with-a-twist I’ve become known for and am now invited to spout—when my voice cracks and the words in my brain no longer come out as sounds from my mouth. It’s a momentary glitch in the system; a gurgling gasp, air pushing through tissue where language should be. The episode lasts only seconds, but even then I know it is a signal, a “check engine” light. Something is wrong in my body, and what is wrong feels serious.
Written with self-deprecation and wit, Ambition Monster is a gutsy and powerful look at workaholism and the addictive nature of achievement, the lingering effect of childhood trauma, and the failures of our modern rat race. This is a Cinderella story of success and a brutal appraisal of the cost of capitalism—perfect for people pleasers, overachievers, and those whose traumas have driven them to strike for “goodness,” no matter the cost.
ON TRAUMA AND GUN VIOLENCE IN AMERICA
"Over and Over Again," by Aubrey Hirsch
[Trigger Warning: Gun Violence]
Aubrey Hirsch is well known as a comic illustrator and artist, but in this essay, she interrogates how gun violence has shaped her life. Author and memoirist Katherine May describes this gut-wrenching essay perfectly, saying, "[Hirsch] draws us into the experience of trauma through the same story, told multiple times. It’s a hoarse-voiced, breathless read, incredibly visceral, unforgettable. She shows how that same act of storytelling—resistant as she is to it at first—is the site of healing. It takes a long time, and a lot of telling, in many different ways.”
This is a brilliant essay, and one that will stick with you.
ON CHANGING TASTES
"An Acquired Taste," by AC Lambert
AC Lambert explores what a changing palate means in relationship to identity in this warm-hearted and expansive essay for Eater.
There’s a tendency for trans people to inventory our lives pre-transition in search of latent gender confusion, incidents that we can point to and say definitively yes, this is who I’ve been the whole time, testosterone or spironolactone side effects be damned.
Was I born this way? Kind of yes, and kind of no. I love cashews now in a way I never did before regularly taking testosterone; I love their smooth unctuousness, the new luxuriousness of salt and oil on my palate. Maybe that’s a function of the medication. But beyond that, starting my medical transition has given me a new lived experience. Now that I move through the world differently — as a man — I relate to food differently. I relate to it as a man.
The men in my family were the kind of people I wanted to be: aspirationally masculine, imbuing Combos and home-brewed beer and peanuts with significance. My dad would sometimes just have nuts and a couple cheese sticks as a late lunch, which never made sense to me; post-transition, I find myself doing the same.