Evaluation Advisory Committee

To ensure that the Kauffman Foundation’s evaluation and measurement work meets the highest standards, the Foundation has named an Evaluation Advisory Committee who provide strategic advice about program and grant evaluation practices.

Our founder, Ewing Kauffman, believed measurement and evaluation were vital tools for his foundation to understand and improve performance. He said, “that you evaluate all of your programs with a good analysis as to how well they’ve succeeded. To be very frank about that that didn’t succeed and to be willing to tell other foundations about the failures that you’ve had because they can learn from that.”

To ensure that the Kauffman Foundation’s evaluation and measurement work meets the highest standards, the Foundation has named an Evaluation Advisory Committee who provide strategic advice about program and grant evaluation practices. Panel members are respected, independent experts who have experience managing or conducting evaluations that are primarily focused on informing practice and/or policy.

The five EAC members have specialized expertise in philanthropy; education; entrepreneurship; community development; and research, policy and influence evaluation.

In addition to advising the Foundation about its overall third-party evaluation portfolio, panel members vet and strengthen evaluation work being considered or planned, provide referrals for potential evaluators, advise on the progress of existing third-party evaluations and provide updates on new studies or methods that are relevant to the Foundation’s evaluation work.

EAC Members

Clare Nolan, EAC chair, is a nationally recognized expert in social-sector evaluation and strategy. She has more than 15 years of experience designing and conducting evaluation and planning projects for philanthropy, government and nonprofit organizations. She has an extensive background in the study, planning and evaluation of complex policy and systems change initiatives, most notably in philanthropy, education, community development and health care.

Julia Coffman founded and directs the Center for Evaluation Innovation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit. The Center specializes in building the field of evaluation in areas that are challenging to assess and where traditional approaches are not a good fit. She also is co-director of the Evaluation Roundtable, a network of foundation leaders in evaluation from more than 60 U.S. and Canadian foundations. Prior to founding the Center, she led evaluation efforts for more than a decade at the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Harvard Family Research Project.

Dr. Vincent Francisco is KHF professor of community leadership in the University of Kansas Department of Applied Behavioral Science and senior scientist with the Institute for Life Span Studies. He is director of the work group for Community Health and Development and co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre at the University of Kansas. He uses behavioral science methods to help understand and improve conditions that affect population health and health equity. Francisco works with community initiatives to help them build capacity for systems change.

Dr. Cory Koedel is an associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His research focuses on teacher quality and compensation, curriculum evaluation and the efficacy of higher education institutions. His work has been widely cited in top academic journals in economics, education and public policy. Koedel is a co-editor for the Economics of Education Review and serves on the editorial boards for Education Finance and Policy and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Dr. Saurabh Lall, assistant professor at the University of Oregon’s Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, focuses his research on social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial accelerators, impact investing and entrepreneurial ecosystems. He previously led the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) research initiative at the Aspen Institute. There, he helped establish the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative, a public-private partnership to study the effectiveness of entrepreneurial acceleration programs.