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

With a decline in federal and state funding for educational evaluation in recent years many evaluators may be seeking new channels.  Fortunately, the corporate marketplace has long been moving in the direction of data-driven decision-making which is a perfect fit for evaluator skills.  This session will explore some of the key differences between evaluating educational programs and learning programs in corporate contexts.  Topics to be discussed include common evaluation models, needed skills and education, terminology, and what to expect when working in corporate settings.

The presenter has over 30 years of experience evaluating educational programs and corporate training and was a staff member at The Evaluation Center in the 1990's and early 2000's.