2024 Reflections
Early 2024 reflections on how I’m building space for grief, responsiveness, action, and accountability.
How 2023 Became My Year of “Ease”
This blog post shares a series of writings from newsletters, blogs, and social media, presented in a “journal” format. Bonus, via the photos I used throughout the year, you get to watch my garden grow.
Resource Roundup: Latine Heratige Month and Indigenous Peoples’ Day
Reflections and resources for Latine Heritage Month and Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2023.
Tips for Hiring a Research Consultant to Support Your DEI Work
Incorporating research or evaluation into your DEI initiative can be incredibly valuable. We’re great at identifying sticking points, providing space for staff to feel more comfortable speaking up, and helping you take a step back when you’re wrapped up in the day-to-day.
However, bringing someone in to reiterate what staff have already been vocal about, ignoring well-documented trends, or hoping information alone will solve your problems without committing to taking action can be ineffective at best, and can often perpetuate the same problems.
11 Ways to Measure Success They Don’t Teach You in Capitalism
Engaging in critical reflection and taking a holistic look at our businesses beyond the numbers is what allows us to see past the balance sheets and identify how we can dive deeper, where we can make improvements, and what kinds of emerging opportunities we can harness. This post offers 11 open-ended, generative prompts to support your reflection and planning.
Reflections and Recommendations in Honor of Indigenous Heritage
Resources, recommendations, and reflections for learning about and honoring indigenous heritage.
Summer Workshop Series Now Available!
Get a jump start on the fall without sitting in a classroom! Read more about the series in this blog post!
“It’s not just activism, it’s our life work.”
Our collective healing relies on building communities of care, supporting organizations that are, and have been fighting and working in their communities, and finding as many ways as possible to make our activism our life work.
What Your Grant Proposals Are Missing (and What You Can Do About It)
Requiring evaluation or impact measurements in funding proposals without the necessary support or information results in stress and busy work for organization staff, bad data, and contributes to inequitable power dynamics between funders and funding recipients. When done well, however, incorporating evaluation can strengthen a proposal by showing commitment to learning, having the information to back up your claims, and using data to tell your story. In this blog post I share my top 4 tips on how to strategically and effectively include evaluation in grant proposals.
What Does Evaluation Have to do with Social Justice, Part 1
Read about our founder, Allison Shurilla’s, journey to evaluation. This post is the first in a series of articles focused on the intersections between evaluation and social justice and how we can use the tools it offers to support our missions and values.
2022 Evaluation Planning Tips
Evaluation planning is one of the tools that helps you not only stay on top of the details but ensure that you maintain ownership over the evaluation process and are developing evaluation systems in your organization that truly give you what you need, cut down on unnecessary busy work, and help you gather the information that will help you do your best work. This post offers tips will help you take stock of your evaluation activities over the past year and give you an idea of where to focus your efforts moving forward!
Let’s Talk About Money: How Evaluation Can Support Fundraising, Grant-Writing, and Donor Relationships
Read about how evaluation can be cost-effective while supporting fundraising and donor relationships.
How Evaluation Culture Can Support You through Pivots and Changes
Evaluation tools can be helpful in grounding, reflection, and problem solving. Learn some of the ways you can incorporate evaluation to support you through this process.
What is an Evaluation Culture and Why Do You Need One?
Learn how evaluation can be a powerful tool in supporting your work.
Reflections and Intentions- Our Commitments in the New Year (and the New World)
A reflection and information on our new business focus and what you can hope to see from us over the next year and beyond.