Community Engagement
Engaging communities to address issues and empowering individuals to tell their own stories
Community engagement is a strategic process that helps organizations better understand the needs and desires of their communities. From public schools to health institutions to tribal organizations, we ground our work in trust and respect and assist our clients to build on their own strengths and capacities. We offer targeted, culturally informed services that can help your organization create meaningful relationships, make more informed decisions, and achieve your goals.
We take the time to truly understand each community’s culture, assets, and challenges. We encourage engagement across barriers and leverage our cross-disciplinary expertise to provide services focused on gathering community input and ideas, collective impact, community asset mapping, group facilitation, tribal-state relations, truth-telling, and racial and ethnic equity. We frame questions in ways that move people toward thinking more deeply about their issues, answering them creatively, and telling their own stories from their own perspectives.
Program Design & Implementation
Applying research-informed methods to create lasting change
Our staff members bring decades of experience in systems thinking, adaptive leadership, change management, and strategic planning to their work. We help our clients design programs and implement change initiatives that have real, lasting impacts. Our data-informed approach helps organizations and communities explore their challenges and identify solutions. This comprehensive service area covers all stages of project design and implementation – from early exploration and data gathering to full implementation and evaluation.
Evaluation
Assessing outcomes, improving practice, and communicating results
We work with public agencies, tribal communities, healthcare providers, businesses, and community-based organizations to increase their capacity to utilize data that clearly define their work, achieve results, and demonstrate impact. We provide independent, objective evaluation findings that help leaders demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of their programs through assessing outcomes, improving services, and communicating results. Approaches used include survey instrument design, data collection, and analysis; economic modeling and forecasting; program assessment and performance measurement; and project management and evidence-based/evidence-informed programs and practices.
Policy & Practice Solutions
Helping leaders identify their goals and prepare to meet them
We assist policymakers in defining and clarifying the issues they face, tailoring evidence-based policy solutions to their real-world circumstances, and helping them understand how policy and practice changes will impact clients, partners, and communities. We bring a broad range of expertise and knowledge from a variety of fields to our policy work, including policy and legal analysis; evidence-informed decision making; practice model development; and the ability to engage stakeholders and vulnerable populations in our work.
Applied Research
Assisting leaders in finding practical answers to real-world problems
Our emphasis on applied research means that, while grounded in the theory of our respective disciplines, we specialize in seeking practical answers to real-world problems and identifying policy and program solutions. Some of our areas of specialization are quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis; secondary data analysis; analytic tools and statistical models; and interpretation of findings that considers policy, organizational, community, and tribal contexts.
Workforce Development
Building capacity for individuals, organizations, and communities
Today’s organizations face serious challenges in attracting, preparing, and retaining the highly qualified staff necessary to keep pace with accelerated changes in the workplace. We assist organizations in anticipating and responding to changing workforce needs and ongoing capacity building. We provide research-based workforce and professional development solutions for a broad and diverse spectrum of professionals, organizations, and sectors. Our workforce solutions are based on a collaborative process of data collection, assessment, design, and development, resulting in products that are tailored to our partners’ desired outcomes and the day-to-day context of their work. Areas of expertise include workforce assessment and planning; organizational readiness tools; application of adult learning principles; customized curriculum design and development; strategies and practices to enhance learning transfer; and design and delivery of classroom, online, and blended learning options.
Communications and Creative Direction
Creating modern communication tools and resources for a clear transfer of information
We firmly believe that resources need to be crafted in a beautiful manner with the target audience in mind. Our creative staff work with organizational and community partners to make sure their important messages are received by the right people, at the right time, and in a dynamic way. We develop and design an array of digital and analog resources, e-learnings, email campaigns, websites, apps, podcasts, and more to help organizations effectively communicate and transfer information and knowledge to their constituents.
Database Design & Management
Empowering organizations to take control of their data and information
Our database designers and administrators help organizations create or update their data systems to allow them to gain critical information and insights from their data. We make sure our partner organizations have the tools and skills they need to readily access information through automated processes and easy-to-use data dashboards. Our data solutions are always tailor-made because we understand that all organizations are unique.