Power: 2021 Design & Evaluation Learning Sprint
Channel: Australian Evaluation Society
Date: 2021-12-09

Facilitators: Shani Rajendra, Jo Farmer

Power underpins all service user interactions with services, programs and policies. But designers and evaluators of these interventions often don’t attend to the issues of power as much as they should in their work. Without understanding, acknowledging and addressing power, this work can replicate the problems with the systems they’re seeking to address in the first place. This risks entrenching privilege and power, and further marginalising those that programs and policies aim to support.
In this session, we will present some frameworks for understanding and identifying power in your work – and the impact it has on your projects. Through this, attendees will co-develop a checklist for identifying issues of power and addressing them throughout a project lifecycle.

Jo Farmer is an evaluator, advocate and policymaker focused on improving health and wellbeing, particularly for those who experience mental distress and are marginalised by social structures. Enabling lived experience leadership and participation is core to her work. Her experience includes strategic planning, evaluation and service design in not for profits, government and service delivery agencies. The community and those with lived experience are at the heart of her work, with a focus on the value of genuine engagement and collaborative design that delivers long-term, meaningful change. Jo combines her own lived experience of mental distress and trauma with her professional experience and skills.

Shani is a Senior Consultant in Clear Horizon’s Social Innovation team. Born in Sri Lanka and raised cross culturally, Shani brings a keen awareness of power and cultural relativity to her design and evaluation. She is also deeply embedded in innovation and collaborative change-making, currently functioning as the Strategy Lead at Moral Fairground, a Melbourne-based platform organisation for ethical businesses and social enterprises.