AEA365 Contributor, Curated by Elizabeth Grim

Hi, I am Gretchen Biesecker, Principal Consultant with Bee’s Knees Consulting LLC in Somerville, MA. A large part of my practice focuses on evaluation capacity-building with nonprofits small and large, including AmeriCorps programs across the U.S. AmeriCorps. AmeriCorps is a federal agency that “brings people together to tackle the country’s most pressing challenges through national service and volunteering.” Through a national network, AmeriCorps enrolls 200,000 Americans each year to meet critical needs in education, the environment, disaster services, public health, among others.

My name is Dr. Tatiana Bustos. I’m an implementation support specialist and evaluator in the public sector. I’m here to discuss sustainability and offer tips to embed it into organizational learning for evaluations.

Hi! We are Maya Lefkowich and Jennica Nichols – arts-based evaluators from AND implementation in Vancouver, Canada. We’re on a mission to expand the capacity for creativity in evaluation with arts-based methods.

Hi! We are Nora Phelan and Lily Corrigan, researchers in the Evaluation & School Improvement Services division at Measurement Incorporated (MI). We partner with non-profit organizations, school districts, and government entities, supporting them to evaluate various programs and interventions, generally in educational settings. Today we are sharing some hot tips and lessons learned from our recent efforts to build evaluation capacity in a large school district using the principles of implementation science.

Greetings! We’re Ava Yang-Lewis and Mark Lewis, Co-founders of ACT Research. In our work, we know that equitable evaluation processes and effective use of evaluation is as much about individual mindset and organizational culture (those tightly held beliefs about evaluation practice) as it is about actual evaluation approaches, methods, and tools. Over the last eight years, much of our work has been about learning and evaluation capacity building (L+ECB) with foundations and their grantees while flipping orthodoxies in foundation and nonprofit culture around evaluation that are incongruent with equity work.