The Evaluation Café is hybrid! Join us for lunch and a thought-provoking conversation in 4410 Ellsworth or via Zoom.
Café Schedule

Michele Girard
Founder
Ivanhoe Development
Program Maturity for Community-Based Organizations: How finance, evaluation, and design intertwine
Ivanhoe Development serves as the first introduction to “evaluation” for many of our organizations (communities have been evaluating since the dawn of time). Our talk will discuss our clients' perceptions, barriers, and complications regarding evaluative projects, emphasizing organizations with limited financial resources. Our team will walk through case studies from Native, Latinx, Immigrant, and Black-led organizations that work nationally in homelessness, addiction, land trusts, legal aid, and more. Finally, we will walk through a few of our tools, such as Risk Tolerance and Evaluation Triage, that aid in assessing internal capacity and assumptions regarding evaluation.

Kelly Robertson
Principal Research Associate
Western Michigan University

Megan Lopez
Senior Research Associate
Western Michigan University
Building Trust & Capacity: Adapting our Evaluation Practices for Small & Grassroots
Small and grassroots nonprofits play a vital role in meeting community needs, often with limited resources but deep local knowledge. Traditional evaluation approaches, often designed for larger organizations, can feel burdensome or misaligned in these settings. This session invites evaluators to reflect on how they can adapt their approaches to better support small nonprofits by focusing on sustainability, utility, and learning. Through real-world examples, we’ll explore practical strategies for building trust, managing feasibility, and fostering evaluation capacity. Participants will leave with actionable tips for making evaluations more responsive and impactful in small nonprofit contexts.

Mary Gayen, MBA, MSW
Manager, Evaluation team
Corewell Health

Alana Bartley, MPH
Evaluation Specialist
Corewell Health

Julio Cano Villalobos, B.A.
Evaluation Specialist Senior
Corewell Health
The Evaluation Journey: Insights, Growth, Failures, and Value
This presentation will explore the evolving role of evaluation within the healthcare system, reframing it from a static endpoint to a dynamic process of ongoing learning, improvement, and growth. Rather than serving merely as a judgment, evaluation is presented as a means to uncover meaningful change—both measurable and transformational—across individual, community, organizational, and societal levels. By emphasizing value over simple metrics, the evaluation team prioritizes shifts that impact organizational practice, and wider community well-being. The team’s approach centers on surfacing key learnings, failures, naming transformations, and leveraging insights to inform future actions, positioning evaluation as an essential tool for achieving health equity and catalyzing systemic progress.

Koren A. Dennison, M.A.
Managing Evaluation & Communications Specialist
UBUNTU Research & Evaluation

Dr. Carolina S. Sarmiento
Associate Professor
University of Wisconsin - Madison

Aurealia-ShaVaun L. Johnson
Employment Services Coordinator and Instructor
The YWCA Madison
Liberation Through Evaluation: Community-Centered Approaches
This session explores evaluation as a tool for liberation within communities, emphasizing our collective responsibility to foster equitable solutions. Participants will learn how everyday evaluative skills can strengthen relationships and address diverse community needs.
The presentation introduces storytelling methodologies like photovoice and journey mapping, which center community voices and lived experiences. These approaches position storytelling as a powerful evaluative practice for understanding complex community realities.
A case study featuring the UBUNTU-YWCA partnership demonstrates these methodologies in action through their Basic Tech Skills course evaluation. This collaboration enabled program participants to share insights, contributing to understanding the program's community impact while generating valuable data for future initiatives.
Participants will reflect on their responsibility to communities they serve and gain practical tools for implementing inclusive evaluation methods that amplify marginalized voices and drive meaningful change. The session highlights evaluation's role in strengthening collective ties and empowering community members as active agents

Andrea Allen
Principal Consultant
AC Insights

Kenlana Ferguson
Executive Director
Michigan Transformation Collective
Truth-Based Philanthropy, Learning, and Evaluation
Trust-Based Philanthropy (TBP), originally co-created by the Whitman Foundation and its grantees back in 2014, gained in popularity during the pandemic and continues to provide a strong foothold for carrying out equitable, antiracist, and generative change. At the onset, however, this approach did not explicitly address evaluation and learning. Fortunately, we – as evaluators – already had at our fingertips multiple, highly participatory social justice approaches that strongly complement a TBP. This presentation will describe the conceptual framework of TBP, the place of learning and evaluation in a trust-based context, and key examples of how funders have operationalized evaluation in their trust-based initiatives.

Carl E. Hanssen
Owner
Hanssen Consulting, LLC
Evaluation in Corporate Contexts: Making the Transition from Education to Training
Abstract coming soon!