Monitoring, Evaluation, & Learning
Providing high-quality information for evidenced-based decision making.Our Mission
M.E.L. leads, partners, and supports organizations, in service of communities, through equity-centered evaluation and research.
Our Values
As researchers, practitioners, and community members, we strive to create a world where all people have the opportunity to achieve their full potential for health and wellness. To do this, we build accountability and trust by engaging partners through tailored approaches that align with their strengths and objectives. We go beyond the basic requirements of a project to conduct thoughtful reflection about equity and community across the project visioning, implementation, evaluation, and close-out phases. We believe this approach promotes more effective, sustainable programs, and it enhances the capacity of our partners to do excellent work.
Strengths and Services
Evaluation & Capacity Building
We draw from the Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation (CREE) framework, which acknowledges histories and sociocultural contexts among evaluation partners to better respond to unequal power relations that often underlie health inequities. Our team has expertise in both Process Evaluation (assessing how a program is planned or implemented) as well as Outcome Evaluation (assessing impacts and alignment with goals). We can assist with developing evaluation aims or metrics, data collection, analysis or cleaning of existing program data, and more.
We report findings using methods that will be the most useful to our partners and communities, emphasizing clear communication and high-quality visualizations. This means creating materials with minimal jargon and actionable recommendations, whether that’s through a public report, Powerpoint presentation, or other form of dissemination.
Our approach is versatile and can be adapted to different resources and timelines. For example, aside from performing program evaluations, we can also provide coaching or trainings to support our partners in building their own capacity to implement evaluations and use data for organizational decision-making.
Human-Centered Research
Our research is more than “human subjects research” – it is human-centered. We emphasize conducting research in a way that is respectful, impactful, and accountable to people and their lived experiences. We utilize mixed methods across qualitative and quantitative approaches while focusing on stakeholder and community engagement, particularly for translational research efforts. Our team emphasizes using concepts and available data on social determinants of health, both for population health projects as well as more localized projects. Using these strengths, we lead or collaborate on research proposals, research implementation, and the creation of reports, articles, and presentations for a wide range of audiences.
Assessment, Quality Improvement, and other Technical Assistance
Our technical assistance centers on gathering information to assess needs, inform decision making, and enhance accountability. Having worked with an array of funders such as state or regional health agencies, federally funded grants, and foundations or nonprofits, we are comfortable with a variety of grant structures. We can assist in planning or writing grants, managing implementation, and ensuring reporting requirements are met, while maintaining our focus on equity throughout.
We also support partners in other capacities, like quality improvement and quality assurance as well through community health assessments or improvement plans (CHA/CHIP). Our team is experienced in survey design and assessing complex data to determine how it can be analyzed to answer relevant questions. We utilize multi-modal data strategies like focus groups and key-informant interviews, using in-person and online formats, to elicit information from varying audiences. We work collaboratively with our partners to design data collection instruments or templates, in line with existing best practices, to fit their needs.