The May 13 Group
the next day for evaluation
The May 13 Group is an emerging ecosystem—a solidarity economy—oriented toward and energized by epistemic* healing and wholeness in, through, and around evaluation.
We recognize groups that the nonprofit/
nongovernmental industrial complex exploits, peripheralizes, and infantilizes as protagonists, with
ideas of our own, rather than perpetual protégés.
We are building power together and actively shaping our world through structurally-focused collective
action, including direct action organizing, cooperative economics, and mutual aid.
*ep·i·ste·mic/ˌepəˈstēmik,ˌepəˈstemik/ adjective (philosophy) relating to knowledge or its validation
Why
evaluation?
Evaluation—data, metrics, key performance indicators, assessment, evidence, impact—directly affects the survival of groups that capital displaces, dispossesses, deprives, and demonizes, by determining which groups end up with resources to shape and change their world. But not in the way that most of us have been taught. It does so through the stories that it tells and the stories that it suppresses about why most people in the USA and the world do not have what they need to live, why some people more than they could ever use, the relationship between the two, and whether—as well as how—this relationship could or should ever change. The capital class created evaluation to measure organizations’ and programs’ value based on what it values and what it believes about how the world works and how it should work. This includes ideas about who has knowledge, how it is produced, and what it should be used for, as well as related ideas about merit and deservingness.
The May 13 Group knows this can’t change at the individual or methodological level. But we do wonder if evaluation can be a site of collective resistance against ongoing epistemic violence* and epistemicide.*
* the violation and killing of entire bodies of knowledge and ways of knowing
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this work-in-progress