Face Valu: A Closer Look

At FaceValu, we understand the importance of building your organization's capacity to use evaluation as a thinking tool.

Using our Learning What Works® evaluation model, we partner with you to focus on:

• Learning what works within your organization through evaluation and reflective processes
• Building community and organizational capacity to make change
• Inserting evaluation practices into your organizational structure that continue to build capacity

Vanessa McKendall-Stephens, Ph.D.

Vanessa McKendall-Stephens has ten years local and national experience working as a facilitator, trainer and evaluation consultant with nonprofits, foundations, educational institutions, and community-based organizations. The core of her work focuses on social and community change through addressing issues of access and equity. Using participatory, capacity-building approaches, Vanessa conducts community research and facilitates organizational process, development of evaluative practices to assess impact, and systematically using evaluation as a learning tool. Most recently Vanessa has been a team member consulting with a Ford Foundation project examining racial equity and community philanthropy primarily in the American South and developed a framework for Negotiating Difficult Conversations about Race.

As a consultant based in Minneapolis, Minnesota she leads projects varying in size, location and scope that include national multi-site and multi-year evaluations in a variety of educational, health and community contexts such as K-12 reform and improvement; higher education access; community health and arts integration to support literacy. Training topics include: attending to culture in evaluation practice; evaluating Interorganizational collaboration; using program evaluation to inform non-profit decisions and increase effectiveness; cultural validity in evaluation; and using evaluation and reflective practices to support continuous progress.

In addition to 20 years of experience at the K-12 and University levels as an instructor and administrator, she worked with Rainbow Research, a non-profit organization that specializes in evaluating social change programs. Vanessa directed a University of Minnesota national collaboration that addressed higher education recruitment and retention for students of color in education and systems change. She holds a doctoral degree in educational policy and administration with a focus in evaluation studies from the University of Minnesota.

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