Services
Services
Work I Love
I am committed to supporting organizations that are dedicated to advancing social, economic, racial, environmental, and gender justice.
I bring together teams of evaluators and issue experts who are grounded in the communities and lived experiences of the issues my clients care about. I draw on my experience and learning from others about how to innovate and evolve evaluation so that it supports the change makers of the world.
Learning about how to support social change movements, fields, and advocates
I partner with organizations to research and evaluate how to use their resources and power in service to and support of social change makers.
Examples of projects include:
The William & Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Global Reproductive Equity Program (formerly the Reproductive Health and Rights Program) introduced a new strategy in 2016 that centered on shifting power and resources to advocacy organizations in sub-Saharan Africa.
As part of a team with the Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program at the Aspen Institute, we conducted a five-year developmental evaluation of the strategy. We engaged with the Foundation, its grantees, and civil society organizations in sub-Saharan Africa throughout the multi-year process, helping them use the evaluation findings to inform power sharing and mutual accountability practices. Lessons from the evaluation informed the Foundation’s new Global Reproductive Equity strategy. (2016 – 2021)
American Jewish World Service (AJWS) wanted to better understand how it supports community- and movement-based organizations and leaders around the world who are at the forefront of realizing human rights and ending poverty in their communities.
As a research and learning partner with AJWS, I initially researched the support and practices that these individual leaders and organizations working in service to communities and movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America find useful. AJWS organized a working group to address the questions raised by the research. We are now developing frameworks, tools, and measurement approaches that AJWS will use to learn about and strengthen its accompaniment practices. (2016 – present)
Mosaic is an initiative in the United States to amplify the power of the environmental field by strengthening movement infrastructure. As Mosaic’s learning partner, I support the development of learning and evaluation frameworks and approaches and conduct short cycle evaluations on topics like Mosaic’s participatory decision-making and grantmaking processes and its approach to building bridges and shifting movement power. (2018 – present)
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was interested in learning more about how change happens through advocacy, particularly in contentious contexts. With Universalia, LLC, I researched and co-authored a paper documenting lessons for advocates and funders about conducting and supporting advocacy on sensitive topics. (2020)
The Aspen Institute’s Weave: The Social Fabric Project is a program that aims to build social trust to address the root cultural cause behind many of America’s social problems.
Creative Research Solutions and I are partnering on research to help Weave understand the experiences and support needs of individuals who serve as social connectors and rebuilders of social trust in their communities. Weave plans to use this research to guide its design of programs to support these “Weavers” across the United States. (2021 – present)
Evaluating Programs and Strategies
I design, conduct, and manage formal, external evaluations and structured learning processes to understand what is working, what’s not working, and why so that organizations can develop effective strategies to support change.
Examples of projects include:
The Ford Foundation’s Technology and Society Program wanted to understand whether and how its adaptive strategy contributed to a field of technology and social justice. Leila Fiester and I evaluated Ford’s role over a five-year period, focusing on the resources Ford provided, the approaches it supported, and the organizations with which it partnered in order to understand the foundation’s role in advancing progress in the field. Ford is using the evaluation results to design and update its field-supporting strategy. (2020 – present)
Wellspring Philanthropic Fund supports the realization of human rights and social and economic justice for all people. I conducted five reviews of the fund’s strategies related to women’s health and rights, human rights, and other topics, spanning work in East Africa, Latin America, and the United States. Where feasible, I partnered with consultants based in the communities and cultures where some of the work was taking place. (2013 – 2018)
ClimateWorks Foundation is a global platform for philanthropy to innovate and accelerate climate solutions that scale. I am collaborating with ClimateWorks Foundation’s Evaluation and Learning Director to develop, commission, and manage evaluations that help ClimateWorks and its funding partners learn about their initiatives. (2017 – present)
American Jewish World Service received support from the United States Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor for a four-year project to support lesbian, bisexual and transgender human rights organizations in four of their focused countries in East Africa and Latin America.
I collaborated with AJWS’s Strategic Learning, Research, and Evaluation team to design project monitoring and reporting systems. Then, together with local evaluation partners, we evaluated the project’s effectiveness, centering the feedback from lesbian, bisexual, and transgender advocates in the program countries. AJWS used learning from this experience to inform its support for community- and movement-based partners. (2014 – 2017)
Developing and using organizational learning systems and processes
I collaborate with organizations to design systems for cultivating and using information for organizational learning. Together, we develop approaches that are useful, center accountability to communities, and leverage resources wisely.
Examples of projects include:
The Pisces Foundation provides grants to nonprofit organizations to accelerate to a world where people and nature thrive together. As Pisces’ Learning and Evaluation partner, I support the Foundation to grow its organizational learning and evaluation culture and practices. Together we test and refine approaches for planning, evaluating, and learning, always questioning how to make practices more equitable and useful to the Foundation and its partners. (2015 – present)
Columbia University’s Women, Peace and Security Program is working to build an understanding of the diverse roles women play to influence sustainable peace and promote human security through everyday activism. The program wanted to develop systems and approaches to measure, report, and evaluate its work — with a specific focus on making visible and valuing the skills, knowledge and connections which participants bring to the program, while taking care not to play an extractive role in relation to participants’ knowledge. (2019 – 2020)
The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. (ELC) funds a range of philanthropic programs globally to improve the wellbeing of people and communities, with an emphasis on women and girls. As part of a team from Itad, I supported ELC to strengthen its strategic focus and measurement of progress related to its priority themes of girls’ education and leadership, health, and environment. (2019 – 2020)
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recognizes that advocacy organizations often lack the resources or support to develop appropriate systems or practices to learn about their work through measurement and evaluation. To help address g this need, the Foundation supported a group of grantees to develop their core advocacy Measurement, Learning and Evaluation (MLE) capacities. I was a member of the team organized by Itad, Inc. to provide this support, working for nearly two years with a group of advocacy organizations in the US on designing and testing bespoke MLE systems and practices unique to each organization. (2018 – 2019)
Change Maker,Let's Talk About Working Together
I am committed to supporting organizations that are dedicated to advancing social, economic, racial, environmental, and gender justice.