The Elevate Journal
Elevate’s Reflections from Recent Conferences
October has been a busy month for Elevate! Many members of our team attended both the TN Nonprofit Conference in Memphis, TN, and the AEA Evaluation Conference in Portland, OR. They made lots of connections, learned and unlearned things, and they’re excited to share their takeaways!
8 Learnings for 8 Years
This month marks eight years since we started Elevate. We were three young professionals with a shared vision who saw a need in the sector, so we jumped in—armed with ambition and plenty of coffee. Over the years, we’ve poured long hours into this work, celebrating wins, tackling tough challenges, and staying true to our core value: learning. In that spirit, we took some time to reflect on what’s brought us here. Here are a few lessons we’ve picked up along the way.
Rediscover Elevate: Get to Know Us and Explore Our New Services!
Let us reintroduce ourselves! Elevate Consulting is a full-service firm dedicated to supporting nonprofits, collaborative community groups, foundations, and municipalities in designing and implementing smart, efficient strategies and programs that improve their community. We are here to help you and your organization live out your mission and drive equitable social change in the world.
We Just Learned a Lesson – How Do We Not Forget?
While most of the thought around learning begins and ends in school, our ability and necessity to learn carries us through the rest of our lives. Because we are taught at such a young age to retain so much information, it can get tricky understanding what to keep and what to forget (I know I don’t remember a lot of the things I learned in school). As we grow and change, the necessity for a mental rolodex of dates, relationships, professional development information, songs, books, etc. increases while the proverbial room in our minds stays the same. How do we keep this information safe and readily accessible? How do we know what information is not necessary to keep on standby?
Reflections from AEA and Staff Retreat
At the beginning of November, our team attended the conference for American Evaluator’s Association (AEA) in New Orleans, and combined that trip with our annual staff retreat. AEA’s annual conference is a touchstone in the ever-evolving field of evaluation and allows professionals from a variety of sector and roles to exchange ideas and engage in dialog about the practice and role of evaluation in social change.
Reflective Practice at Elevate
At Elevate, we have a core value around learning. This often shows up in our external work with clients where we collaboratively learn with partners and actively look for ways to augment learning through the work we do and the deliverables we produce. Learning also plays a central role in the internal work we do as an Elevate team, and reflective practice is one tool we use to learn and grow together.
Facilitating Groups Utilizing Emergent Strategy Principles
At Elevate, we have the pleasure of working with many different groups working toward changing the systemic conditions that are creating and reinforcing marginalization and injustice. We do this in a number of spaces, from early childhood to homelessness to workforce development, and in every situation, we’re challenged by the complexity of the systems, the scope of the challenges, and the nuances of the relationships of the people in the room. These spaces require us to be not only skilled facilitators but also constant learners and scholars of the ways in which systems change can actually be brought about.
Evaluation Method Spotlight: Youth Participatory Action Research
At Elevate, we strongly believe that evaluation and research must go beyond the numbers to tell the stories of people and communities. As such, we believe in the value of qualitative and community-based, participatory methods and approaches, including participatory action research (PAR). Specifically, we recently had the privilege to support Nashville’s Opportunity Youth Collaborative (OYC) in conducting a youth participatory action research (YPAR) project with its Youth Leadership Team to inform the strategy of the OYC.