Telling the Story With Pride and Dignity: Journey Mapping for Equity-Centered Homelessness Evaluation
Speaker: Tanisha Tate Woodson, PhD
She is the Founder and Principal of Woodson Insights Research + Evaluation, a Portland, Oregon consultancy specializing in Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation. She is a data scientist and an evaluator, and her practice pairs analytic rigor with community accountability. Tanisha designs qualitative and participatory methods that widen what counts as data and keep authorship with the people whose lives are being measured. She facilitates the CREE Learning Series and convenes The Black Collective, a standing community research panel that captures the attitudes, experiences, and priorities of Black communities. She partners with foundations, nonprofits, and public agencies on evaluation that communities themselves find trustworthy.
Description:
Imagine: One missed paycheck. One hospital bill. One landlord who sells the building....
In this economy, the distance between housed and unhoused is shorter than most of us would admit. What waits on the other side is a system that is difficult to navigate and a public that too often responds with judgment. When people who are homeless seek services, they are asked to repeat their worst moments at every new door, in exchange for a bed, a voucher, or a spot on a waitlist. That process administers shame.
This session introduces journey mapping.
A journey map is a visual, narrative account of a person's path over time. The storyteller can determine the moments that mattered, the decisions they made, the doors they knocked on, and how each system responded. Journey maps can be drawn, spoken, photographed, or built from objects, so participation does not depend on a quiet room or a long formal interview.
What to expect:
We will walk you through the full process, from the first prompt to the final analysis, using a project in Oregon as the working example. In that work, journey maps informed a regional housing coordinator's decisions about where need concentrated, who existing services were not yet reaching, and what people said they needed to help them move out of homelessness and secure stable housing. We will show how the maps kept authorship with the storyteller at every step, and how that choice made the findings both more dignified and more accurate.
You will leave with another tool for your equity evaluation toolkit!
A method you can adapt to your own projects, prompts that protect the people who share their stories, and a practical route for applying Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation practices to you own work.
