I bring over 20 years of professional experience in public policy, advocacy, and evaluation. My experience includes supporting service delivery and advocacy organizations and their funders in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States.
During my twelve years as an evaluation consultant, I’ve worked with civil society and non-governmental organizations, development institutions, and funders on practical and useful learning and evaluation strategies. To date, I’ve worked on 54 projects with 32 clients.
I honed my evaluation skills by first learning about how everyday people make social change.
After completing my Master’s Degree dissertation on social change movements in post-World War II Japan, I served as International Affairs Aide to Senator Akiko Domoto, a trailblazing domestic and international champion of human rights and the environment who deepened my knowledge of how global agreements are brokered and leveraged to shape domestic agendas.
Subsequently, I spent three years with the National Audubon Society and ten years with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s International Program (now known as Planned Parenthood Global), contributing to efforts to bring about global, national, and community-level change. As part of this work, I studied and experimented with more systematic ways of measuring and learning about what works and why.
Over the past decade, I’ve translated these formative experiences into evaluation work that supports people and organizations leading game-changing initiatives in their communities and countries. I’ve learned through experience that process matters, and involvement of clients early on in any evaluation enhances the usefulness of the results.
In producing solutions, I typically work in partnership with an organization’s staff or with other evaluators. When working with other evaluators, I draw on a network of issue and evaluation experts and defer to the leadership of my colleagues who are members of the communities or cultures where the evaluation is taking place. When producing evaluations, there should be a lot of learning and no surprises in the final report. I benefit from the depth of program experience offered by program teams and advocates.
I currently live with my family in a small Vermont town.
When I’m not working with my clients, I am busy converting our lawn to flower and vegetable gardens and working with my neighbors to build an inclusive and connected community.
I am committed to supporting organizations that are dedicated to advancing social, economic, racial, environmental, and gender justice.