Vidhya Shanker, PhD, Independent Evaluation Consultant has had a strong interest in three things—art, math, and racial/ economic/ gender/ disability justice—since elementary school. She credits this combination to embodying what are perceived as contradictions—having been raised by a musician and a physician, and having both profited from and been victimized by systemic oppression. She began organizing around justice-related issues in middle school and has spent more than two decades—her entire professional life—contributing these areas of interests and training to the public and nonprofit sector, whether as an independent consultant or staff member at government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations of varying sizes in the USA and internationally.

Vidhya earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts as well as a Bachelor of Arts in the History of Art from the University of Michigan. Disappointed with white-led arts institutions’ failure to meaningfully address structural oppression in their programming or their operations, she found meaning and belonging in culturally-specific arts organizations that were deeply engaged in social transformation. In an attempt to respond to the lack of funding and infrastructure at the latter, she pursued a Master of Arts from the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, with a primary concentration in Nonprofit Management. She designed a secondary concentration in Race, Class, and Gender in Global Perspective in an effort to compensate for the program’s failure to contextualize, let alone repair, deep patterns of racial stratification in the nonprofit industry.

Vidhya’s subsequent experience with social service and social change organizations led her to pursue a doctorate in Evaluation Studies, which she just completed last year. Her dissertation research bridges systems thinking with critical theories of systemic oppression to examine how race is constructed in and through evaluation. She has since tried to put her dissertation research into practice. Specifically, she has engaged other evaluators from marginalized groups in identifying and disrupting the routinized patterns of business-as-usual that reinforce the concentration of resources and authority within an increasingly professionalized class of decision-makers who have no ongoing personal experience with or material commitment to groups suffering disproportionate levels of poverty, disease, and violence. This work includes co-founding the Minnesota IBPOC in Evaluation Community of Praxis, which brings together Minnesotans from racially otherized groups working in evaluation to ensure that their ancestral, experiential, and community knowledge substantively inform not just evaluated programs but also the field of evaluation at large.