How I Work
Projects, partnerships,
and practice in motion
This is a living record of the work, spanning evaluation, capacity building, data analysis, facilitation, and narrative synthesis across public health, housing, philanthropy, and social sector contexts. Each project is followed by a brief reflection labeled with one of the four practices from Curious Connections, the inquiry framework at the center of how I approach this work.
Curious Connections practices
Curious Inquiry
Beginning with wonder rather than certainty; staying open to what the data hasn’t yet named
Relational Exploration
Looking at how different elements connect rather than examining each piece in isolation
Contextual Understanding
Recognizing that data never exists in a vacuum; every pattern reflects a context with history behind it
Collaborative Sensemaking
Bringing diverse perspectives into interpretation; the analyst rarely has the full picture alone
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A multi-year evaluation of a $750,000 bundled philanthropic portfolio comprising three interconnected health equity research initiatives, examined not as separate programs but as a collaborative ecosystem. Produced semi-annual reports surfacing cross-initiative patterns and emerging synergies, and contributed to the evaluation team’s presence across all three initiatives simultaneously, attending in-person writing retreats, convenings, and program planning meetings. Applied a developmental evaluation approach grounded in culturally responsive and racially equitable evaluation principles, using ethnographic observation to track how grantees, scholars, and partner leads were organically building connections, sharing resources, and developing unified responses to shared challenges.
Reflecting on Relational Exploration
What stayed with me from this work was watching researchers and grantees start to see their own work differently when the cross-initiative patterns were named out loud. There’s something that happens in a room when someone realizes their isolated experience is actually part of a larger story, and getting to be the person who held that thread across three very different initiatives was one of the most meaningful things I’ve done professionally.
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A capacity building initiative supporting three Black women leaders running youth diversion and prevention organizations in majority Black cities across the Deep South. Built each organization’s data infrastructure and narrative capacity through individualized technical assistance, facilitating sessions on strategic narrative framing, helping organizations identify and prioritize audiences for their data storytelling, and designing activities that built durable internal capacity for data use and communication.
Reflecting on Contextual Understanding
The moment I loved most in this work was when an organizational leader shifted from describing their data as a reporting burden to seeing it as a tool for telling their own story on their own terms. That reframe, from compliance to agency, is exactly why I do this work.
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An evaluation and learning project examining strategies for engaging system and community-based practitioners in intergenerational approaches, network strengthening, and learning collaborative effectiveness. Analyzed participant and grantee feedback data across multiple collection points, synthesized emerging themes around youth co-creation and authentic leadership development, and produced analysis aligned to the project’s learning framework through close-out.
Reflecting on Curious Inquiry
What I kept returning to in this work was how much young people already knew about what they needed, and how often that knowledge was sitting right there in the data waiting to be named. Getting to synthesize that and hand it back to the people doing the work in a form they could actually use felt like the whole point.
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An evaluation of a regional foundation’s community-driven change initiative exploring what capacities help grantees effectively engage community members in decision-making and how unrestricted funding influences organizational stability across a cohort of 20+ grantees. Most Significant Change story submissions were layered against grantee annual reports to capture the full range of organizational experience, with those findings now shaping an evolving design built around Learning Circles that create space for peer sensemaking and reflective meaning-making among grantees. Led the initial evaluation design through a landscape scan and analysis of foundation documents, then transitioned into the implementation support lead role in partnership with the foundation program officer, managing project coordination and ensuring the evaluation infrastructure holds space for genuine collaborative interpretation.
Reflecting on Curious Inquiry
What this project got right from the start was refusing to impose a definition of success from the outside, centering instead the premise that grantees are the ones holding the wisdom about community-driven change and the foundation’s job is to learn from it. Most Significant Change became one structure for trying to capture that wisdom, adapted here to focus not on what mattered most but on the what and why of organizational change, with questions designed to help grantees reflect specifically on stability and capacity. That kind of evaluation, where the framework serves the community’s knowledge rather than the other way around, is exactly the kind I want to keep doing.
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A mixed methods evaluation of a community-centered foster care recruitment program designed to disrupt racial disparities in the foster care system of a major metropolitan area, where African American and Black children were significantly overrepresented among children entering care. Conducted the full mixed methods analysis for the final evaluation report, incorporating oral histories and narratives alongside quantitative indicators to capture progress toward community-defined goals. Synthesized implementation learnings into a report that examined how the program disrupted traditional power hierarchies and provided an honest account of the challenges of implementing systemic change within existing institutional frameworks.
Reflecting on Contextual Understanding
What felt most significant about this work was getting the framing right for a program that had been through a lot. Implementation is rarely clean, and this one was no exception. But the program team had poured themselves into something that mattered deeply, and they needed a final report that held both the complexity of what had been hard and the clarity of where to go next. When they told me the report captured it, that it gave them something to stand on and point toward, that was the kind of response that makes the writing worth doing.
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A participatory evaluation of a multi-million dollar initiative supporting two cohorts of Black-led arts and culture organizations. Held listening sessions with grantees to center community-defined success before finalizing the evaluation design, then conducted in-person go-along visits to gather place-based insight that virtual methods could not surface. Produced a journey map narrative that illuminated what organizations were actually doing rather than measuring them against funder assumptions.
Reflecting on Relational Exploration
The go-along visits were the part of this work that I think about the most. There is information you can only get by being in someone’s space, watching how they move through their work, noticing what lights them up and what drains them. The journey map became something real because of those visits, and several organizations told me it was the first time they had seen their own work described in a way that felt true.
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A national qualitative study on leadership development and movement ecosystem dynamics among Black-led organizations and intermediaries. Conducted thematic and narrative analysis of 50+ in-depth interviews with organizational leaders and funders, synthesizing emergent themes around power, organizational structure, and the impact of the 2020 racial reckoning on the broader movement landscape.
Reflecting on Contextual Understanding
What I found most compelling in this analysis was how candid people were about the tension between the external visibility of the 2020 moment and what it actually felt like inside their organizations. The themes that emerged weren’t what funders were expecting to hear, and I think that’s exactly why they needed to be said clearly.
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A monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning engagement with a statewide civic advocacy organization working to advance racial equity through voter engagement, legislative advocacy, and civic organizing. Contributed to a discovery phase that included cleaning and coding key informant interview data and facilitating a partner survey to assess the organization’s current data culture, with findings synthesized into a discovery brief. Facilitated three participatory circuit training sessions with fewer than 30 staff members to co-develop measurable benchmarks for the strategic plan, and produced an implementation toolkit as the final product to support ongoing internal data collection and use.
Reflecting on Collaborative Sensemaking
What I genuinely loved about this work was the circuit training format. There’s something powerful about designing learning experiences where people aren’t passive recipients but are actively building something together in real time. Watching staff move from uncertainty about what to measure to real ownership over their own benchmarks was exactly the kind of shift I hope for in every capacity building engagement.
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A training and technical assistance initiative building data and evaluation capacity across a cohort of youth-serving organizations. Designed and facilitated two of five 90-minute virtual workshops covering youth-led data collection, survey development, and experiential sensemaking, researching and compiling customized resources for grantees as part of each session. Also provided approximately 40 individual one-on-one data and evaluation coaching sessions, adapting support to each organization’s specific needs, context, and developmental stage.
Reflecting on Collaborative Sensemaking
The one-on-one coaching sessions were where this work came alive for me. In a group, people perform confidence they don’t always have. In a one-on-one, someone can finally ask the question they’ve been sitting with for months, and when the answer lands, you can see it happen. Those moments of genuine shift are what I keep showing up for.
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A comprehensive mixed methods evaluation of an international systems change network, examining the network’s effectiveness at building connections, fostering learning, and embedding equity across its foundations. Analyzed qualitative data from key informant interviews and collaborative data parties, designed and distributed a member survey to assess perceived value and engagement preferences, and wrote significant portions of the final report including the executive summary, methodology, findings, and recommendations sections. Also created the report cover and key data visualizations.
Reflecting on Relational Exploration
This was one of the first projects where I felt the full arc of mixed methods work come together in a way I was proud of. The qualitative themes and the survey patterns kept speaking to each other in ways that deepened the analysis, and writing the narrative synthesis felt like finally finding the language for something the network had been circling for a long time.
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A four-year external evaluation of a domestic violence systems coordination initiative examining how effectively a network of fourteen organizations coordinates to serve survivors across a regional response system. Contribution is focused on supporting metrics refinement to feed into statistical analysis of coordination outcomes, equity analysis of service access patterns, and the eventual development of a regional data dashboard to identify who is and is not being reached and where structural gaps show up in the data.
Reflecting on Curious Inquiry
Equity analysis in a systems context is where I feel most like myself as a practitioner. The question underneath all the data is always the same: who is this system actually serving, and who is it leaving behind? Getting to build infrastructure that helps a network keep asking that question over time is work I care about deeply.
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A longitudinal data analysis of a foundation’s wellbeing grants strategy examining how grants supported staff and organizational wellbeing across three cohorts of nonprofit grantee partners over time. Compiled and cleaned survey data across cohorts and multiple timepoints, conducted descriptive analysis to identify patterns and trends, generated tables and summaries for internal learning, and prepared a written summary of key findings to inform the final evaluation report.
Reflecting on Curious Inquiry
Longitudinal work requires a particular kind of patience and attention. The patterns only reveal themselves if you hold the full picture across time, and I find that kind of careful, cumulative analysis genuinely satisfying. There’s a moment when the trends start to speak and the story of what actually changed, and what didn’t, becomes clear.
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A data analysis engagement for a statewide suicide prevention training program serving over 1,700 professionals across multiple sectors. Analyzed demographic patterns, geographic distribution, and engagement metrics across the full training dataset, created data visualizations to illustrate program reach and gaps, and produced targeted recommendations for expanding outreach to underrepresented communities and professional sectors.
Reflecting on Contextual Understanding
What mattered most to me in this work was the reach question. A training program is only as equitable as who it actually gets to, and the demographic and geographic analysis made the gaps visible in a way that raw numbers alone never could. Turning that into recommendations the program could actually act on felt like the whole point of the analysis.
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A comprehensive statistical analysis of over 2,300 vulnerability assessment profiles within the Central Florida coordinated entry system. The analysis revealed that Black and African American individuals who met chronic homelessness criteria were consistently scoring below the threshold for permanent supportive housing, even with severe health conditions and disability. Findings were presented to system leadership with a policy memo and recommendations, and directly influenced system-wide policy revisions and the development of a working group to create a regionally contextualized assessment tool.
Reflecting on Collaborative Sensemaking
This was the project that made me understand what data-driven advocacy could actually do. The disparity was there in the numbers all along, but nobody had pulled it together in a way that demanded a response. Presenting those findings and watching the system take it seriously enough to change its practices was the moment I knew this work was worth staying in.
The work I care about most leaves something behind.
Not only a report. Not only findings. A foundation.
