With 120+ Evaluators and growing in the Network, we are in conversation regularly with ACE Evaluation Network Members, the Game Changers. Here we offer space for them to share their experiences, perspectives, and current projects with the ETB® community.

ACE Evaluation Network Member Debbie Kim, PhD is a qualitative and mixed-methods researcher, evaluation strategist, and capacity builder with more than 20 years of experience leading equity-centered evaluations across K-12, postsecondary, and community-based settings. As the daughter of Korean immigrants who rebuilt their lives through education and collective care, Debbie learned early that opportunity is shaped by systems, and that people most affected by those systems must guide the solutions. Debbie’s evaluation practice centers partnership, power-sharing, and community-defined outcomes. Learn more about Debbie in the evaluator database.

Reading Rooms 

By Debbie Kim 

My Ph.D. adviser once told me that just as people look like their dogs — or is it that dogs start to look like their people? — we start to look like the theories we hold dear to our hearts. In other words, researchers and evaluators often begin to embody the assumptions, habits, and values embedded in the frameworks we work with and within. The longer I’ve worked in evaluation, the more I’ve found this to be true in my own practice and life.

For me, that process of becoming started with my family. My parents experienced persecution, displacement, and political upheaval during World War II and the Korean War. They immigrated to the United States through educational sponsorships at a time when very few pathways existed for Korean families. Watching what access to education made possible for my family gave me an early and visceral understanding that systems shape lives. And because systems are made by people, they can also be changed by the people who live within them.

Looking back, I know where my curiosity about how people navigate social systems started. Growing up as the daughter of Korean immigrants, I navigated two worlds that didn’t always translate easily into each other. The cultural norms inside our home looked different from what I experienced outside of it. That gap was not a problem to solve so much as a permanent condition to move through. In time, I came to see that living in that gap made me acutely attentive to how context shapes meaning, how the same action can read entirely differently depending on who is watching, and how people find their footing when the rules keep changing depending on which room they’re in. I didn’t have language, or theoretical frameworks, for it then, but I was already asking the questions that would eventually lead me to evaluation.

My work is grounded in institutional and organizational theory, but at its core, I became an evaluator because I am interested in how people make meaning together. I am fascinated by how organizations interpret evidence, how systems respond under pressure, and how people navigate uncertainty, power, and change. What drew me in was the puzzle of it. Why do some institutions adapt while others calcify? Why does evidence sometimes change practice and sometimes disappear without a trace?

Over time, though, I started noticing something uncomfortable. Traditional evaluation approaches often positioned communities and participants primarily as sources of data, not as interpreters, decision-makers, or co-creators of knowledge. The frameworks I was using to study how systems advantage or disadvantage people were, in some cases, reproducing the same extractive dynamics I was trying to understand. That tension pushed my practice toward approaches that are more relational, participatory, and equity-centered. The framework changed me. Or maybe I changed the framework? Probably both.

Being part of Expanding the Bench® (ETB) and the ACE Evaluation Network has felt like finding a room where those questions are already in the air. Evaluation can sometimes feel strangely isolating, particularly for independent practitioners whose work sits at the intersection of research, practice, facilitation, and community engagement. ACE feels different. I have been energized by the openness, thoughtfulness, and generosity of the people in the network, and by a shared commitment to building an evaluation ecosystem that is both rigorous and humane. ACE is, in its own way, a community that embodies its own values.

Being in that kind of community has also made me more attentive to a convergence happening in my own work. In addition to leading evaluation and consulting work through PAVE Education Consulting, I recently stepped into a lecturer role at Northwestern University, teaching institutional and organizational theory. I expected those roles to feel distinct. Instead, I’ve found myself returning to the same underlying questions in both spaces: How do systems shape the people inside them? Where does power concentrate, and where does it get redistributed? What does it look like when an organization actually learns? Increasingly, teaching, evaluation, facilitation, and consulting feel less like separate roles and more like different expressions of the same inquiry.

My adviser’s observation has stayed with me over the years. The more I sit with it, the more I realize she was describing something circular. We gravitate toward the theories that already reflect something true within us, and then we spend our careers being shaped by them in return. The frameworks I am drawn to — relational, participatory, equity-centered — immediately resonated with me because of where I come from: a family that crossed borders, a childhood spent reading rooms, and a persistent belief that systems shape lives and that people can reshape them. My practice didn’t create that worldview. Rather, it gave it language and a home.

As a result, my work is not just a set of methodological choices. It is an expression of something I have always believed. Evaluation, at its best, is the practice of helping people make meaning from their own experience. It should strengthen rather than extract from the communities involved. The belief came first; the practice followed.