Organizational Development/Evaluation/Community Engagement

Fierro Consulting has woven organizational development, community engagement, and evaluation in a four-year trauma training for officers and community members in Newark, NJ.
The integration of complexity theory, systems change, and civic engagement in the mixed-method evaluation ensured that:

1) the project was accountable not only to its funder, but also to the communities it serves.

2) the community’s priorities directed the project’s development and evaluation.

3) the Evaluation Action Team grew its capacity to engage conflict, differences of opinion, and collective trauma.

4) the implementing organization generated and is implementing a long-term strategy in its advocacy campaign.

More about https://ejusa.org/Equal Justice USA.

Organizational Development/Evaluation

Fierro Consulting co-lead the national Evaluation Technical Assistance team for the WK Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation initiative.

We provided technical assistance for evaluators nationally in 14 cities, supporting their evaluations in integrating developmental, culturally responsive approaches, systems and complexity perspectives, and participatory leadership integration where appropriate.

Our expertise contributed in navigating the polarity between locally-focused work and strategic national learning and the critical role of being Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation while doing Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT).

More about our approach to racial healing work: Social Change is a Fractal Thing and Racial Justice isn’t enough.

Evaluation/Community Engagement

In partnership with the Become Center for Social Change we have conducted a two-year evaluation of the American Libraries Association’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation program across 70 libraries across the country where “community partners and underserved teen audiences in reading and discussing four theme-related books and participating in programs led by a racial healing practitioner.”

In our culturally-responsive, mixed-method evaluation we included youth engagement in a youth advisory group and used art in our research tools as instruments of youth reflection.

We also provided feedback on ways to build the capacity of the project to foster  equity and social change.

More about ALA’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. You can read the full report findings here. And watch a video here.

Evaluation

SenseMaker® is mixed-method methodology that engages storytelling to descrive social or psychological complexity. In 2014 Dr. Fierro trained an evaluation team in Ethiopia to plan and conduct a SenseMaker study of girls in the Afar region.

The purpose of the evaluation study was to assess changes in attitudes towards education, identify the value and purpose of education in Afar, the barriers to education, and the decision making process for sending girls to school.

Read more about the findings and articles on SenseMaker methodology and Child-centered design.

More about ALA’s Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation You can read the full report findings here. And watch a video here.

Organizational Development

Fierro Consulting led the Center of Peace in a leadership development, strategy, and engagement renewal process, by building its Board capacity to assess its strengths and blindspots, conduct its fiduciary responsibilities, and involving  its congregation in collective decision making.

Throughout this community-wide process the congregation created a new vision and mission, redirecting its attention and drive, while also facing tremendous adversity, the loss of its founder and spiritual leader.  

The community has become a lot stronger via more widespread leadership participation and financially stable. While it wasn’t our primary mandate, trauma tends to emerge in every group. Our task in to learn from it without allow it to sabotage the work.

More on how we transform trauma Read more about the findings and articles on SenseMaker methodology and Child-centered design.. 

Writing/Public Speaking

An indictment of systems that claim to care for children. Six Black mothers take us to the frontlines of helping systems (immigration, welfare, child welfare, housing, juvenile justice, mental health, abuse-to-prison pipeline) that don’t really help, but exploit trauma to maintain punitive social control, especially of people of color.

Dr. Fierro’s own story exposes how “helpers” must confront their own pain and condescension, before anything can change. A social and economic justice movement is growing that is transforming trauma.

We can replace punishment with healing, for the sake of all children. A follow-up to her dissertation study of African American mothers who lost their children to foster care, Dr. Fierro interviewed six mothers over 15 years to capture how their individual stories of family separation reflect mechanisms, that attempt to socially control the poor, that are as old as our country itself.

Read more about the book about family separation at the USA Border. More about how this connects to African American and Native family separation. More on Dr. Rita’s Public Speaking and Creative Writing