Who I am and what shapes my practice

There is something that happens when you grow up holding two worlds at once, two cultures, two languages, two ways of making sense of everything around you, that quietly becomes the lens through which you see all of it. For me, that experience of constant balancing, of moving fluidly between perspectives and learning early that neither one canceled the other out, shaped something foundational in how I approach people and problems.

My path into evaluation, learning, and strategy was never linear. It started in direct service as a Public Ally thrown into social and human services, then grew through years inside nonprofits and expanded across sectors through consulting, where I found myself weaving together data and narrative, facilitating meaning-making, and translating between audiences long before I had names for any of it. Professional development and coaching helped me understand that what I had been doing wasn’t just a set of skills I happened to pick up along the way. It was a posture, a way of showing up that I had been building my whole career without quite knowing it.

What shapes my practice most is the belief that context is not a caveat. It’s the whole point. I’m drawn to the questions that sit underneath the questions organizations think they’re asking, to the places where data and lived experience tell different stories and something important lives in the tension between them. All of it, the work, the learning, the honest self-reflection about how I show up, has pushed me toward one through-line I keep returning to: evaluation done well is cultivation. It isn’t about extracting findings and leaving. It’s about building something that takes root.