We define transparency as being honest and clear with ourselves, with each other, and with our broader personal and professional communities. A lack of transparency is a defensive strategy. It is an approach used when a person or an entity is in fear or experiencing scarcity. We will work towards creating a culture of safety. From a safe base, we will be comfortable saying where we’re at, even if that leads to some discomfort and hard conversations. We will be clear in what we are thinking, where we are coming from, and what processes we are using. And we expect and hope for the same in return. 

Why is it that the second something becomes “professional” all the joy and fun immediately disappears? This actually ends up being a huge barrier in evaluation practice in our experience. How can we expect staff and community members in our evaluation projects to stay engaged and give us accurate, authentic data when their experience of the evaluation is stale, joyless, and stiff? We also are deeply aware that we only have so much time on this planet and guess what? We want the many hours of our life we spend doing paid work to also be fun and meaningful. We commit to creating a joyful and fun work environment that leads to joyful and fun evaluation practices that actually keep partners, staff, and community members authentically engaged. 

Part of integrity is living within a system of moral values and principles and enacting those values and principles even when challenged or when the situation makes it hard. Another definition of integrity is to be in a state of wholeness, undivided into parts. For us at EEG, we both commit to living up to these stated values, even when it is hard and challenging. And we commit to finding a state of wholeness that will allow us to walk away and to challenge power when systems and structures pull at us to engage in practices that are antithetical to our integrity-either our commitment to our stated values OR our state of wholeness. 

We believe in a definition of cultural humility that embraces the idea that no culture deserves a place of omnipotence or ubiquitousness. And all cultures deserve respect and equal positional power at the decision-making table from programmatic development through dissemination. We commit to iteratively and developmentally testing out innovative practices and processes to invite more and more cultural diversity at all the decision making and financial stakeholder tables at which we sit and to work to infuse programs with methods that lead towards this aim. 

In healthy organizations and families, there is a flow of information among members of the system. At EEG we very much value ongoing, healthy communication patterns where information is shared in respectful and timely ways without logjams and blockades preventing the flow of key decisional information.

Anyone who studies the brain and brain development would tell you that we understand now that mistakes are how our brains learn. Whether it's our own mistakes or watching others make mistakes, nothing is more powerful to our brain architecture and chemistry, than error. And yet, as humans we are trained to be error free, and to be filled with fear and shame around making mistakes. What happens is that we become afraid and start making decisions to avoid making a mistake (risk-based) versus making decisions that have the potential to really create something new (innovation). In our experience we have seen this time and time again in organizations and systems of all kinds. What we want at EEG and to promote in the organizations that we work with is that when the risks associated with making a mistake are minimal to none and the potential gains of finding a new way are moderate to large, we intentionally try new things knowing mistakes will be made. Innovation requires a culture that appreciates a growth mindset and makes decisions with a focus on a real analysis of risks and reward, i.e. when the risks are low, and the potential gains are big, let's make some mistakes together and learn something new. Item description

We believe that our value and the value of every human is intrinsic and separate from transactional and productive behavioral outputs. We and you have value simply because we are living beings on this planet. So often we value each other within a transactional framework and therefore we only have value to each other based on what we do for the other. We want to connect within our business and to other people in our work, within a relational and human-centered context where we are doing this thing called work together AND separate from that, you and we have value and connection as living beings. We can choose to partner or not partner, we can have hard conversations and end our professional relationships, we can give each other critical and constructive feedback, AND we can do all of that while staying in relationship and valuing each other as human beings separate from our professional transactions. 

Often in evaluation practice, evaluators are brought in to conduct an evaluation of a program to tell key stakeholders about what’s happening in a program and what key decisions should be made. In our experience this is a failed model because it often leads to evaluation work that is replicative of what staff could have told you right at the beginning and the more meaningful and important and complicated evaluation questions don’t get asked. We believe program evaluation and science-based exploration of human centered initiatives are at their best and most accurate and useful when everyone is connected in shared exploration. 

As humans we like to pretend that work relationships are somehow distinct and separate from personal relationships. But in many ways this is an artificial distinction in our society and it makes it easy for us to pick up and drop human relationships in professional contexts in cavalier and transactional ways that we would not dream of doing in our personal life. We want to stay in relationship throughout our professional relationship, through the good stuff and the hard stuff and to stay connected in whatever ways make sense as our relationships (professional and personal) ebb and flow.

We orient ourselves to our work through a lens of abundance. There is more than enough social change work. We do not believe in growth through competition. We believe in growth through shared opportunity. We each have our own strengths and gifts and others do as well. We may not be the right people for every opportunity and we look forward to partnering with others, to open doors for them to opportunities that they may not have had otherwise. As they say, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”