Uncategorized

Hello! I’m Arthur Hernández, an evaluator and educator whose work focuses on evaluation, community engagement, and the forms of knowledge we authorize as credible.

Hi, I’m David Howard, principal at DBH Consulting, a small firm partnering with nonprofits, foundations, and public agencies to strengthen how they use data, measure impact, and make strategic decisions. I am also an unabashed logic model enthusiast. Over two decades working in homeless services, child welfare, criminal justice, and workforce development, I’ve helped build or review more logic models than I can count — and have used them to teach dozens of graduate courses and train hundreds of practitioners. Here are a few Hot Tips I often share, plus one (free) Rad Resource I recently created and a couple more I have leaned on.

We are Ava Yang-Lewis, Founder/Principal of ACT Research, and Dana Jensen, Program Director at the Carlson Family Foundation. Over the past several years, we have partnered to build and integrate an equitable evaluation approach into the Foundation’s grantmaking. Sharing learning is one of our values. While we have not systematically studied this approach (it might be in our future!), we’re writing this post to share a handful of learning and evaluation practices that have strengthened our grantmaking and made it more meaningful and impactful.

Hi! We’re Dr. Ann Price, founder and President of Community Evaluation Solutions, and Dr. Sheila B. Robinson, owner of Custom Professional Learning, LLC. Ann has spent 25+ years she has partnered with communities, coalitions, nonprofits, and foundations to design, implement, and evaluate programs across education, public health, youth development, and community coalitions, while Sheila brings more than 30 years’ experience designing and facilitating professional learning on a multitude of topics for educators, evaluators, and other professionals.

Hello! I’m Arthur Hernández, an evaluator and educator whose work focuses on evaluation, community engagement, and the forms of knowledge we authorize as credible.

We’re Evan Gattozzi, Senior Project Manager with Informing Change, and Meghan Hunt, Senior Consultant with Engage R+D. Our two evaluation and learning firms have been working alongside the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation* to sustain and strengthen equity-centered evaluation. At a time of increasing injustice and ongoing threats to equity and equity-centered work, we’re also seeing important efforts to sustain practices and strengthen relationships among equity-centered practitioners and funders, which we want to share today.

We are Diana Rohlman, Taylor Vogel, and Francesca Germano–toxicologists and evaluators at Oregon State University. Our lab conducts exposure science studies with community members to better understand what chemicals they are exposed to, and if those chemicals might be harmful. We are dedicated to ensuring that study participants have easy access to their data. The process of analyzing, preparing, and then giving people study results is called the report-back of research results, or RBRR.

Hi! My name is Rick Davies, and I am an evaluator with a long-standing interest in people’s stories — about the past, as collected through the Most Significant Change (MSC) technique, and about the future, as generated through ParEvo and other foresight methods. Over the past year I have built a free browser tool for analysing them, and what I want to share is the method rather than the software.

Hi! I’m Nishat Akhi, a doctoral student from Bangladesh studying at Boston College and an AEA Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) scholar. During my internship with Intention 2 Impact (I2I), I expected to learn new methods and better understand how evaluators measure systems change. I did. But my most important learning came from watching how

Hi! My name is Shelita Hall-Augustus. This summer, I worked with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation through the AEA Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) to answer a question that affects all of us: can AI identify evaluation methods the way human evaluators do? I tested ChatGPT and Gemini against ten MacArthur Foundation