In this conversation, Carolina and The May 13 Group’s producer delve into the ecosystem metaphor again, discussing its implications in the nonprofit sector, the importance of holistic understanding, and the interconnectedness of various players within the ecosystem. They explore the nonprofit industrial complex as an ecosystem, the role of intention, and the potential for destruction and nourishment within these systems. The discussion also touches on the evaluation theory tree as a metaphor and questions the value of the ecosystem metaphor itself.
Episode 13 transcript
Notes
COMING SOON!
References
COMING SOON!
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
Donate!
In this episode, host Vidya Shanker welcomes The May 13 Group Podcast producer, Nayantara Premakumar, to explore the metaphor of ecosystems in relation to their work and personal experiences. They discuss the importance of understanding ecosystems holistically, the impact of colonialism and capitalism on land relationships, and the misappropriation of ecosystem language in various fields. The conversation also touches on personal reflections, cultural connections to land, and the need for deeper interrogation of the systems we create and participate in.
Episode 2.3 TRANSCRIPT COMING SOON!
Notes & References COMING SOON!
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
In this episode, Ramya Kumaran—a scholar and practitioner around imagination, play, and futures—joins host Vidhya Shanker to explore the transformative power of collective imagination for building new worlds beyond the ones we inherited. We challenge listeners to question whose imagination shapes our current realities and discuss The May 13 Group not as a single utopia but rather as a potential portal or protopia—an incremental steppingstone toward better possibilities. We invite listeners to reflect with us on healing, solidarity, and moving beyond survival to shift our perspective and open paths to meaningfully different futures.
Episode 2.3 TRANSCRIPT COMING SOON!
Notes & References COMING SOON!
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
The May 13 Group will be closed from mid-July to mid-August. Our team will be tending to our other gardens, which means time away from email and limited engagement with social media. In the meantime, you can stay connected with us through our website. If you would like to reach us, you can do so at team@themay13group.net and we will respond when we can after we return in August.
In this episode, hosts Carolina and Vidhya dive deep into collectivism in relation to the (neo)liberal ideology of individualism that underpins the nonprofit/nongovernmental industrial complex and evaluation. We invite Naaima Khan, a strategist and evaluator, to discuss the implications of collectivism in the context of structurally-focused analysis and action. The conversation weaves personal reflections, historical definitions, and critiques of language to explore themes of leadership, accountability, and culture. We discuss the need to shift how success is defined, acknowledging the discomfort that often accompanies true collectivism.
Notes & References COMING SOON!
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
In this episode, hosts Carolina and Vidhya reflect on our first year building a solidarity economy through this podcast. We connect recent topics—collective knowledge-making, individualism, and the idea of an economy—to each other, evaluation, accountability, and resource distribution. We note the years of work ahead, as today's socio-political situation results from decades of deliberate effort, not recent elections. Grateful for your feedback, we commit to being accessible to everyone fighting within the nonprofit industrial complex.
Notes
References
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
In this episode, Carolina and Vidhya engage in dialogue with Justin Laing of Hillombo Consulting to understand the idea of an economy, which is foundational to building a solidarity economy. We delve into the way knowledge—or perhaps narrative—is produced within racial and gendered capitalism and the role evaluation plays for the owning and ruling class. We close with an invitation to imagine what knowledge work could look like, and what individual roles we each may play, in alternative economic structures.
If you would like to learn more about Justin, he can be found at www.hillombo.net, @hillombo on Instagram, and using
Episode 8 Transcript
COMING SOON!
Notes
COMING SOON!
References
COMING SOON!
Music
"Inspired" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact Us
Website: https://themay13group.net
Carolina: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carodela
Nayantara: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nayantara-premakumar
Vidhya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vidhyashanker
Donate to our podcast! https://the-may-13-group.raiselysite.com
Summary
Carolina and Vidhya reflect on individualism and interrogate how it shows up in our personal lives and is built into our work—including NPIC and evaluation’s training, practice, and literature as well as existing field-building and change efforts.
Notes
Resources
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact:https://themay13group.net
Summary
In this episode, we discuss “The Power of Perspective: Generations of Evaluators Generating Change,” an interactive journey map featured at the 2022 American Evaluation Association conference. Rooted in popular education and critical pedagogy, it highlighted the suppression of critical voices in evaluation and connected participants’ lives to a lineage of resistance within the field. We discuss its development, installation, and reception, along with future plans, including digital platforms, workshops, university curricula, and ‘zines. Efforts to enhance accessibility, including language and disability justice, are part of the ongoing collaboration’s dreams.
Notes
References
Music
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
Summary
In this episode, thought partner and podcast producer Nayantara Premakumar joins hosts Carolina and Vidhya to reflect and update listeners on our retreat and recent milestones. We share our struggles resisting racial/gendered capitalism through cooperative, decentralized, and transparent governance and ownership structures. This includes a discussion of fiscal sponsorship and technocratic tools for decision-making. We also highlight upcoming changes to the podcast, including efforts to tie together our personal, professional, and political analyses; to acknowledge the lands we’ve inhabited; and to explicitly prompt reflection and action.
Notes
01:30: It was a post on NPOCunicorns | People of Color Nonprofit Professionals, not a Facebook ad
17:21: Is Fiscal Sponsorship Right for You? gets at some of our hesitation. See more on The May 13 Group PODCAST webpage.
21:03: While Caro took the lead on this effort, the list referred to here was actually compiled by the New Economy Coalition’s Solidarity Economy Funding Library, which we think we became aware of through the Open Collective. Open Collective allows groups to raise and distribute money in a transparent, decentralized way. See more on the PODCAST webpage.
29:12: “Society at large” is meant to suggest everyday members of society who may not directly participate in the funded and evaluated programs—for example, will they benefit from reduced crime, etc. It is meant to drive a wedge between them and the underclass who do directly participate in funded and evaluated programs. See more on the webpage.
30:24: This understanding does not reflect the most recent research, such as The origins of SWOT analysis | ScienceDirect, which suggests that SWOT was developed by industries that profit by serving the U.S. military’s imperial interests and the business model of never-ending war, but it was not necessarily developed by military institutions. It was, however, uncritically adopted by nonprofit organizations despite the nature and ostensible purpose of their work being entirely different. Of course, military responses do have their place (e.g., Black Panthers, Zapatista).
39:09: The expansion is not exactly exponential in that it does not reflect the change between 3 to the 4th power and 3 to the 3rd power. But the expansion is not linear because the increment of growth is not static or consistent—it continually increases.
References
Music
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
We're going to be taking a break this month, but we'll be back in October. In the meantime, you can stay connected with us on our website themay13group.net.
Summary
In this episode, Sarah Stachowiak joins Carolina and Vidhya in reflecting transparently on our financial relationship. How does the owning class’s control over manufacturing processes and products show up in the knowledge economy and the evaluation of public and nonprofit/ nongovernmental programs? What does it mean for the “raw material” (data about/ from program participants)? For the “independence” of knowledge workers, who market ourselves in terms of how much more value we produce for the people who pay for our goods and services? Can we think of financial exchange differently? How could we organize accountability in knowledge work horizontally across class status—not necessarily around shared experiences of oppression, but rather around shared resistance against it?
Notes
References
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
Summary
In this episode, Carolina and Vidhya reflect on the tension among learning from the past, meeting immediate needs in the present, and both imagining and building a better future. We discuss evaluation’s origins as a tool for capital and grapple with our status as members of the professional/ managerial class. Folx with our training and current positionality find uncertainty “risky.” Whose interests do we ultimately serve? Could a solidarity economy offer evaluators a safety net or better fallback position from which to make collective demands—by organizing ourselves or joining existing movements that serve the working class?
Notes
References
Music
“Inspired” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0
Contact us
Summary
In this episode, hosts Carolina De La Rosa Mateo and Vidhya Shanker ask, “why evaluation?” We wonder if evaluation can be a site of resistance against racial/gendered capitalism, when capital developed evaluation to support its interests and continues to control the means and ends of knowledge production. Can evaluators renounce capitalism and positivism to organize against exploitation alongside the working class? Can we refuse to take EEI, DEI, CRE, GEDI, CRT, etc. for granted and change the structure of the knowledge economy?
Notes
References
Music
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
LinkedIn:
Summary
In this episode, we (hosts Vidhya Shanker and Carolina De La Rosa Mateo) introduce ourselves, share how our worlds came together, and discuss The May 13 Group. We talk about our personal histories inside and outside evaluation, the Minnesota IBPOC in Evaluation Community of Praxis, how The May 13 Group came to be, and what it could possibly become. We invite anyone who works in and around evaluation or other knowledge work (e.g., philanthropy, nonprofits, NGOs, government, academia) to take a listen and help craft the ecosystem!
Notes
1 correction: At the 45:34 mark, Vidhya misspoke by saying "before my generation and even before me" when she meant to say "before me and even before my generation."
References
Music
Contact us
Website: https://themay13group.net
Linktree (Vidhya): https://linktr.ee/dr.vidhyashankerphd
LinkedIn:
The May 13 Group is an emerging ecosystem oriented toward—and energized by—epistemic healing and wholeness in, through, and around evaluation. Join hosts Carolina De La Rosa Mateo and Vidhya Shanker as they dive into ideas and stories that deepen our understanding of how structurally-focused collective action, including direct action organizing, can challenge capitalist relations of knowledge production and colonial ways of knowing, reclaim the means and ends of knowledge production, and build the foundation for a solidarity economy.
