ABSTRACT
Ricardo Alfonso Millett is a person of African descent, born and raised in the Republic of Panama, more specifically the Panama Canal Zone. Exposure to social activism at Brandeis introduced Ricardo Alfonso Millett to social policy research that transformed his bottom of the well-perspective into a useful lens to understand race-based social inequality. The federal government, as a sponsor of the research, wanted to ensure that the research methodology was impeccable and noncontroversial. The research orientation is significantly influenced by the evolving practices of participatory evaluation, transformative evaluation, empowerment evaluation, and Ricardo Alfonso Millett's own very nascent articulation of these approaches that he calls evaluation with a diversity lens (EDL). EDL is an approach to program evaluation that emphasizes the importance of incorporating diverse voices to identify problems and to engage in program design, implementation, and data analysis.
