MEMconsultants has been an invaluable resource, providing ongoing evaluation support and priceless insights to our work in youth arts education and partnerships with public schools. They help bring a comprehensive and delicate approach to the process of both telling the story of the program’s impact to outside stakeholders and bringing vital internal clarity and wisdom that allow us to make programmatic improvements.
— Alicia Craven, Director of Education, Seattle Arts & Lectures
Mary set a strong foundation for our strategic planning process by gathering meaningful values and vision input from our large and diverse staff as well as our Board of Directors. She listened well and learned quickly to understand the complexities we faced as a multicultural, multilingual and multi-service center. When faced with a rapidly changing landscape due to the pandemic, she guided our Leadership Team and Board to create decision-making tools that ensure our reactions and choices are in alignment with our vision and values. Mary’s emphasis on prioritizing staff voice in planning and decision-making assured representation and buy-in across the agency.
— Michael Byun, Executive Director, ACRS
We had the pleasure of working with MEMconsultants on a multi-year project wherein they gathered invaluable visitor and community feedback that will guide the refresh of our permanent exhibit. Recommendations that emerged from their gallery observations, intercept interviews and community focus groups will enable the museum to greatly improve the visitor experience and more accurately represent the diverse history of our region.
— Isabelle Heyward, Exhibits Manager, MOHAI
Our partnership with MEMconsultants has been an invaluable asset to our organization. They have so much knowledge and experience in education, youth development, and evaluation, and deeply understand the nonprofit context. From the outset, they listened closely to our needs: they helped us amplify youth voice in evaluation by hosting focus groups, developing a powerful PhotoVoice project and a customized Youth Participatory Evaluation Toolkit; they supported us in our need to meet new, complex reporting requirements; they were helpful thought partners in brainstorming solutions to both in-person and remote data collection and reporting challenges during this extraordinary year. It’s so gratifying to find partners we can trust implicitly in this work.
— Kate Elias, Director of Data and Evaluation, Southwest Youth & Family Services
Mary and her team are knowledgeable, flexible and engaging. They are responsive, understanding and respectful partners but (perhaps most importantly) they are also incredibly fun to work with. With their guidance, evaluation has shifted from a scary unknown in our organization to a creative learning opportunity that helps us better achieve our mission and work together as a group.
— Regan Pro, former Deputy Director of Education + Public Engagement, Seattle Art Museum
One of the things I value about working with Mary is her willingness to experiment and her flexibility. It can’t be easy to maintain comparable data from year to year in an organization that grows and changes as much as ours, but Mary finds a way. She has worked with us tirelessly to develop new assessment tools, and she is as adept developing long-term evaluation strategies as she is helping us wordsmith a single survey question to make sure it reaches its intended audience. When we are working on a project, she becomes part of our team and she is truly interested and invested in the outcome for our organization. She is a pleasure to work with.
— Leslie Collins, former Deputy Director, Arts Corps
From the start, Mary showed a clear understanding of our program and how it worked. She helped us to see our organization from a fresh perspective and determine how we could grow successfully.
— Bill Eisele, Project Coordinator, Team Read
The team brought an insightful and much appreciated lens to our program again and again, seeing us through years of significant growth, illuminating the forest — and the trees — in ways we could not have seen on our own.
— Scott Gelband, former Executive Director, Seattle Music Partners
Throughout a complex project, the MEMconsultants team was communicative and thoughtful, able to gather input from a variety of stakeholders and adapted to changing requirements. They created professional dashboards in a timely manner. We are so appreciative of the great work they did.
— Jim Theofelis, Executive Director, A Way Home Washington
PEI’s tremendous growth over the last two years required creative and often changing evaluation plans. MEMconsultants always listened and adapted — going above and beyond to collect the needed data. Their analysis and recommendations helped PEI in our efforts to continuously improve our program delivery. We are most grateful!
— Denise Buck, Program Director, Pacific Education Institute