The Work in Motion: Weaving Stories into Strategy
The gap between doing the work and telling the story, we live there.
Welcome to a collection of the practice in motion, working alongside communities to support equitable systems. From statewide assessments to federal equity portfolios, this work is about more than reports. It is about building sustainable power and amplifying stories for the communities the work is built with. Across every project, the scope and partners shift, but the threads remain the same: lived experience first, the patterns inside it next, strategy built from community wisdom, and systems shaped to last beyond the work itself.
Filter by Thread
The Transformative Threads.
The work follows four threads, not a fixed sequence. Each project below lives inside one of them. Click a thread to see the projects that thread shaped.
Stories in Motion
Starting with lived experience as it is spoken and felt. Community voice as the essential foundation for truth, not just a data point.
Patterns Taking Shape
Looking across stories and context to see what is forming. Finding shared themes and hidden gaps that standard surveys often miss.
Strategy in Formation
Co-designing the roadmap alongside those most impacted. Plans built on community wisdom, not top-down assumptions.
Systems in Transformation
Building the foundation for long-term change. Shifts in policy, practice, and community power that outlast the project.
National Undergraduate Research & Mentorship Evaluation
Surfaced a hidden belonging gap in a growing computing research program, guiding leadership to build community alongside technical training.
Read more +STEM Pathways | Mixed-Methods Evaluation | Capacity Building | Longitudinal Tracking
An impact evaluation of a national initiative helping undergraduate students transition into advanced computing research programs. Analyzed pre- and post-survey data across academic years to reveal significant findings in research persistence. Produced a strategic reports that guided program leadership to integrate structured networking activities and targeted support for imposter syndrome, ensuring the program could provide its supportive culture.
The drop in the students' sense of belonging is the finding I think about the most. It is so easy to look at improving technical scores and assume a program is a complete success. But finding these Patterns Taking Shape reminded me that learning how to do research is not the same thing as feeling like you belong in research. My role was to make sure the leadership team saw that reality. By bringing this gap to the surface, I helped them shift their mentorship approach proving that you can't just teach hard skills; you have to actively build community, especially when a program is scaling up quickly.
Municipal Children’s Fund Equity & Engagement Assessment
Translated 600+ community surveys and focus groups into a practical funding guide centering historically marginalized families' priorities.
Read more +Community Needs Assessment | Quantitative Analysis | Data Visualization | Strategic Planning
An evaluation for a local children’s fund to help guide how they distribute their grants. Analyzed data and created visual charts for over 600 community surveys paired with stories from focus groups and interviews. Highlighted core community needs, including the demand for culturally specific system navigators, accessible mental health care, and fair wages for social service workers. Supported report creation that elevated the voices of historically marginalized communities, giving leadership a practical guide to align their funding with families priorities and needs.
What I kept returning to in this work is that a funding strategy is only as good as the community input behind it. It is easy for a large fund to make assumptions about what families need. By identifying the real gaps, like fair wages for social workers and accessible mental health care, we helped leadership understand community priorities and needs. My contribution to the Strategy in Formation was making the survey data easily digestible, ensuring that the fund's future decisions are supporting the community needs and services.
National Computing Fellowship & Mentorship Evaluation
Revealed financial and social barriers facing non-traditional doctoral fellows by driving program redesign to support students from admission through completion.
Read more +Pipeline Development | Higher Education Equity | Comparative Evaluation | Program Strategy | Mixed-Method
A multi-year evaluation of a national fellowship program designed to help industry professionals transition back into doctoral computing programs. Analyzed survey data across multiple cohorts, comparing their experiences against national benchmark data to measure shifts in their sense of belonging, research confidence, and graduate school readiness. Revealed that while personalized coaching successfully boosted academic confidence, non-traditional students still faced burdens around financial ambiguity and social isolation. Produced comprehensive evaluation reports that guided leadership to create clearer financial roadmaps, extend fellowship timelines, and build dedicated peer networks, ensuring the program supported their graduate school pathways.
Reading through the experiences of these fellows, it became clear that it can be intimidating to leave a stable career and become a student again. By identifying these Patterns Taking Shape in the survey feedback, I was able to show leadership that non-traditional students need a completely different kind of support system. My contribution was ensuring the program didn't just focus on getting people admitted, but actively addressed the financial realities and peer connections they need to thrive in their doctoral programs.
National Education Initiative Evaluation Design
Co-designed culturally responsive evaluation protocols with community advisors to ensure equity and power-shared data collection.
Read more +Evaluation Design | Culturally Responsive Evaluation | STEM Education | Capacity-Building
An evaluation design and pilot testing project for a national education initiative. Collaborated with a community advisory committee to review the evaluation plan, ensuring the methods were culturally responsive and equity-focused. Developed a testing strategy and revised the interview and focus group protocols based on direct community feedback. Designed outreach plans to recruit diverse group of participants. Facilitated debriefing sessions to evaluate question clarity, cultural sensitivity, and potential power dynamics.
Statewide School Behavioral Health Evaluation
Revealed staff burnout and privacy concerns impact student well-being tracking, which redirected state strategy toward trust-based school partnerships.
Read more +Qualitative Analysis | Focus Group Design | Public Health Evaluation | Systems Change | School-based Mental Health
Designed focus group facilitation protocols and led the qualitative analysis for an evaluation of a statewide school behavioral health grant. Transcribed and analyzed feedback from students and school staff to uncover barriers to tracking student well-being, revealing privacy concerns, and staff burnout. Co-authored the final evaluation report by providing state health leadership with practical recommendations to simplify reporting requirements, fund better local data systems, and establish transparent, trust-based data-sharing agreements with school districts.
Medical College Curriculum & Clerkship Evaluation
Combined student focus groups and clinical data dashboards to support curriculum decisions.
Read more +Curriculum Evaluation | Data Visualization | Mixed-Methods Analysis | Medical Education | Community Listening
An evaluation of the pre-clerkship and clerkship curriculum for a state university’s college of medicine. Co-designed and analyzed student focus groups to gather feedback on basic science courses. Analyzed performance and evaluation data drawn from clinical tracking systems. Built interactive data dashboards to help the evaluation team monitor clerkship performance, student feedback, and grading trends. Compiled these findings into reports for the medical school’s curriculum committee, providing clear steps to improve course structures, exam prep, and clinical teaching methods.
Regional Health Council Mental Health Evaluation
Built and trained a participatory evaluation system for post-COVID mental health services, translating federal data requirements into useful tools for clinical staff.
Read more +Participatory Evaluation | Capacity Building | Quantitative Analysis | Federal Grant Evaluation | Behavioral Health Care | Data Management
Co-designed a participatory evaluation plan for a federally funded project aimed at strengthening mental health services for communities impacted by COVID-19. Developed data collection tools and provided technical training to clinical staff on how to conduct in-person client intake surveys. Managed sensitive patient data using secure online platforms. Generated monthly reports that tracked patient enrollment, diagnoses, and specific service needs, providing the council with clear data to improve care and meet federal grant requirements.
The part of this project that stuck with me the most was the data collection training. I realized that if we want to build trust in the data collection, the process must serve the people doing the work. I focused on ensuring our reports gave the staff a holistic perspective of their patients' SDOH and needs for social support services.
Statewide Justice Reinvestment & Health Equity Assessment
Synthesized 200+ community voices from listening sessions to directly shape statewide reinvestment grant priorities for BIPOC and transgender communities.
Read more +Qualitative Synthesis | Strategic Planning | Community Listening | Statewide Strategy | Strategic Facilitation | Policy & Advocacy
An evaluation of eighteen community listening sessions and four deep-dive interviews to help guide the distribution of a statewide reinvestment fund. Centered the lived experiences of over 200 participants to uncover severe gaps in safe housing and culturally responsive mental health care for BIPOC and transgender communities. Presented these findings to state leadership in a report that directly influenced grant priorities, ensuring the final funding roadmap focused on real community needs like neighborhood infrastructure and reentry support.
What I kept returning to was how often community members felt this was the very first time the state invited them to share their feedback. I realized my role was to act as a bridge, ensuring their personal histories were treated as primary evidence rather than just passing stories. By centering Stories in Motion, I helped state leaders move past high-level assumptions and build a strategy that actually reflected the stated needs of the community.
Multi-District School Mental Health Systems Evaluation
Uncovered district-level gaps in student mental health referrals across local school districts, building the case for a unified, equitable intake process.
Read more +Youth Wellness | Federal Grant Evaluation | Quantitative Analysis | Systems Change | School-Based Mental Health
A multi-year evaluation for a federal grant focused on building mental health infrastructure across three regional school districts. Analyzed screening and referral data, revealing that while students were being identified for support, there were significant differences in how each district actually connected them to care. Provided district leadership with the evidence needed to transition toward a unified, secure intake process, ensuring students could effectively access the support they needed.
Behavioral Health Capacity & Trauma-Informed Care Expansion
Analyzed over 100 federal baseline interviews to surface service disparities among BIPOC, underserved communities and strengthen trauma-informed outreach.
Read more +Behavioral Health Care | Quantitative Data Analysis | Clinical Capacity Building | Federal Reporting
An evaluation of a federal recovery grant designed to reduce barriers to care for adults with serious mental illness and substance use challenges. Managed a data collection effort that met a federal target of over 100 baseline interviews to analyze health screenings and lifestyle indicators. Revealed specific service trends among underserved enrollees, providing clinical sites with the evidence needed to improve their outreach and strengthen their trauma-informed care.
As I analyzed hundreds of individual interviews, I saw how daily realities, like housing and education, directly impacted a person's recovery progress. Identifying these Patterns Taking Shape allowed me to show the clinics that effective care requires looking at the environment a person returns to, not just their clinical diagnosis. I felt my biggest impact was turning raw federal data into clear, practical recommendations for more trauma-informed outreach.
Multi-Regional Youth Wellness & Relationship Evaluation
Evaluated 300+ youth surveys to reveal real-world skill gaps and shift a federal program beyond compliance toward student-centered outcomes.
Read more +Youth Development | Philanthropies & Foundation | Outcome Analysis | Sexual Health Education
A multi-year evaluation of a federally funded initiative designed to promote healthy relationships and decision-making among high school youth. Analyzed data from over 300 surveys, finding significant improvements in student attitudes toward substance use, goal setting, and conflict resolution. Synthesized these findings into a report that helped program leaders refine their curriculum and better prepare students for healthy preventative care, as well as financial and career transitions.
What I kept returning to was how much students wanted to talk about the practical intersections of mental health and financial needs. By identifying these Patterns Taking Shape in their feedback, I was able to show our partners that we needed to move past a simple "check the box" compliance mindset. I made sure the final report advocated for a program that addressed the real-world skills and healthy behaviors that students said they actually needed to thrive.
Strategic Assessment for Virtual Reproductive Health Education Access
Identified digital equity barriers through bilingual research to help an organization bring culturally safe reproductive health education online.
Read more +Sexual Health Education | Digital Equity | Parental Engagement | Community Needs Assessment
A community assessment to help transition evidence-based reproductive health workshops from in-person to online platforms. Utilized bilingual surveys and interviews to identify systemic barriers, such as “Zoom fatigue” and a lack of reliable internet access in rural areas. Developed a roadmap for maintaining caregiver engagement through interactive virtual design and bilingual content delivery.
In this project, I realized that technology can either be a bridge or a gatekeeper. I focused on the idea that for Systems in Transformation to be effective, they must prioritize equity, or they will leave behind the families who need them most. I felt a deep responsibility to ensure that moving online didn't mean losing the sense of cultural safety the community relied on. Helping an organization change its delivery model to reach parents in their own language and on their own time is exactly why I do this work.
Clinical Mentorship Infrastructure for Rural Opioid Response
Proved a 36% increase in provider confidence through evaluation of a rural MAT mentorship model, helping secure it as a state health infrastructure.
Read more +Public Health | Workforce Capacity | Substance Use Disorder | Systems Evaluation
An annual evaluation of a statewide clinical mentorship system designed to improve the delivery of Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) in rural Arizona. Managed data collection and analysis for a collaborative consultation model that matched experienced practitioners with new providers to increase their capacity to treat opioid use disorder. Proved the model’s effectiveness by showing a 36% increase in provider confidence and high satisfaction with the matching process. Provided state leadership with the evidence needed to sustain the mentorship platform and secure its role in the state’s healthcare workforce strategy.
What I kept returning to in this work was that a system only changes if the people inside it feel supported enough to try something new. I built evaluation tools that captured the actual exchange of knowledge between mentors and mentees, rather than just counting who completed a training. By proving that this peer-to-peer connection directly increased provider confidence, I helped the team see that the system was truly built on trust between clinicians. Helping turn a temporary grant-funded project into a permanent piece of rural health infrastructure inspired me to continue working on rural health evaluations.
National STEM Alliance Equity Evaluation
Reframed success for an 800+ participant national STEM alliance by shifting measurement from event satisfaction to long-term career equity outcomes.
Read more +Mixed-Methods Evaluation | STEM Diversity | Collective Impact | Federal Grant Evaluation
A mixed-methods evaluation of a national, federally funded alliance supporting diversity and research pathways across various STEM mentorship programs. Analyzed survey and comparative data from over 800 participants to identify systemic gaps and workforce trajectory. Produced a strategic reports and a new evaluation framework that shifted the alliance towards tracking long-term career trajectories and collective impact.
Shifting how this alliance defined success is the part of the work I think about the most. It is incredibly easy for large initiatives to look at high post-survey scores and assume everything is working perfectly. By focusing the data on who are historically excluded, specifically students from rural and under-resourced universities, I helped the leadership team re-strategize the alliance needs. The new evaluation framework became a tangible tool for accountability, ensuring the alliance aligned its funding to support lasting, systemic change rather than just temporary interventions.