Kylie Nicholas is the founder of KA Nicholas Consulting. KANC is a woman-owned, full-service evaluation, facilitation and planning consulting firm that provides tailored support and tools to individuals, programs, and organizations that are working to achieve more equitable outcomes through their work. She is passionate about helping organizations develop evaluation strategies that tell the full story of the program’s work without burdening program staff or participants. Kylie has developed evaluation strategies for foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies, including multi-year evaluation strategies for Greater Twin Cities United Way Innovation Initiatives programs. For over 10 years, she has been drawing on her complementary backgrounds in program evaluation and the arts to develop creative strategies for gathering insights to help nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies understand and refine programs. When she's not thinking about evaluation, Kylie is probably exploring her St. Paul neighborhood with her dog and toddler, digging in her gardens, or trying a new-to-us brewery with her spouse.

 Erin Flicker, 2026 President-Elect

Erin Flicker, PhD, MSW, LICSW (they/them), serves as the Deputy Director for Integrated Population Health at the Minnesota Department of Human Services. In this role, they lead the state’s efforts to design and implement integrated care models that support whole-person health. Over the past decade, Erin has guided research and evaluation teams in behavioral health, focusing on program implementation, policy evaluation, and building infrastructure for evidence-based service delivery.

Erin is also the founder of Flicker Consulting, where they help organizations incorporate evaluation practices into their programs using a systems approach.

Outside of work, Erin loves exploring new restaurants, reading, and spending time with their two middle-schoolers. Always up for a book chat, they’re happy to swap recommendations anytime.

 Alissa Jones, 2024 Past President

Alissa Jones (she/her) is the Associate Director of Operations at Wilder Research. In her role, she develops long-term and short-term strategies with a focus on organizational effectiveness, advancing tactical initiatives, and assessing results to support organizational vitality, culture, and the achievement of mission-oriented goals. She is passionate about cultural humility, culturally responsive and equity-focused evaluation, and reflexivity in evaluation practice. Alissa is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. She holds a Master’s degree in Anthropological Studies of Mexico from the Universidad de las Américas- Puebla, in Cholula, Mexico, and received a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities with a double major in Spanish/Portuguese and Chicano Studies.

Sam Storck-Post, Treasurer

Samuel Storck-Post is an Evaluation Officer at The Constellation Fund, a foundation mixing philanthropy with cost-benefit analysis. He earned a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, and has a background in education and college access. Sam was driven to pursue evaluation out of an interest in understanding how to apply evidence-based practices. In his free time he enjoys hiking, sewing and various other crafts, and sword fighting.

Patrick Kaiser, Treasurer-Elect

Kim Oren, Secretary

Kim facilitated data utilization among stakeholders of seven employing colleges and universities, across 20 years. Collaboratively with faculty and staff, he led and developed many student outcomes assessment plans and studies, across institutional levels of analysis. Kim led and facilitated assessment program planning, consulted on revisions of institutional database structures, constructed and executed research methods and sampling plans, developed instruments for data collection, analyzed and reported data, and (ultimately) promoted stakeholders’ use of findings. Across the past few years, Kim started Clear Case Grants (a consulting company), served as Chair of the Data Team for a regional affiliate of one of the two major political parties, and volunteered with the Veterans Administration and with nonprofit organizations. Additionally to evaluation work, Kim enjoys classical music, traditional jazz, sports, Minnesota’s great natural resources, and continuously reinforcing his Christian faith.

Renee Wharton, Student Representative

Renee is a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota in the Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development program pursuing the Human Resources Development track and a minor in Program Evaluation. In her professional role, she is the Recruiter and Coordinator for the Early Career Program for Boston Scientific's Minnesota sites.Through her education and research, she seeks to contribute to the field of HRD by studying best practices and developing frameworks for Early Career Program building and evaluation. As Student Representative on the MNEA Board, she is eager to learn more about the current state of evaluation across various fields and partner with professionals who share her love of being a scholar-practitioner in their work.

Ashley Estrella, Membership Co-Chair

Ashley Estrella is a program evaluator with over 10 years of experience in non-profit, federal government, and state government settings. She holds a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree in Community Health Promotion with a focus in Program Evaluation from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is passionate about co-developing evaluation frameworks with health and human services professionals and the communities they serve. 

Ray Martinez, Membership Co-Chair

Ray Martinez is the Founder and Principal Consultant of RM Methods. They thrive in creative and collaborative solution building through relationship centered activities. Their expertise in building shared understanding, strategy development, and coaching guides their work with nonprofits and foundations. Ray believes that pragmatic, iterative practice towards more connected, collaborative, and brave cultures in our organizations will strengthen our collective capacity to deliver impactful results today and seed new possibilities for tomorrow. That’s why they founded RM Methods to support individuals and organizations doing the good work through evaluation, program design and capacity building services. Ray has been evaluating programs and practices for over 10 years in a variety of roles in the education, sexual violence, child abuse, and philanthropy sectors. Ray is a mixed race, queer, non-binary person dedicated to anti-racist practice. They hold a BA in Spanish Language and Latin American Studies from Colorado State University and a Master’s of Social Work from the University of Minnesota with a specialization in Non-Profit Management.

Tarnjeet Kang, Program Co-Chair

Tarnjeet is the Director of Equity Assessment at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system office, where she supports equity-related assessment, evaluation and research. Prior to moving to Minnesota, she supported non-governmental organizations, United Nations agencies and governmental institutions with evidence-based decision-making and practice. Her work is guided by core values including local responsiveness, decolonization, community-centeredness, as well as gender and conflict sensitivity in research and evaluation. She holds a PhD in Education Policy Studies from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Katie Boone, Program Co-Chair

Katie Boone, Qualitative Researcher and Community Engagement Coordinator, Economic Assistance and Employment Supports, Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Katie has over 20 years of experience working in and with communities. She is an integrated practitioner whose work is grounded in experiences from the Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter, as a certified Narrative Coach, and a deep Regenerative Practitioner. Her roots are in community building and designing collaborative and transformative systems change.

Bringing her lived experience as a teen mom, Katie believes in and has witnessed the power of story and lived experience from communities who are most impacted by inequity to transform more just policies and practices for all families to thrive. She seeks opportunities to design and implement experiential and developmental learning that builds the capabilities of people seeking to make transformative change. This is her calling: value driven work that is rooted in equity and community. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Leadership, policy Development and Evaluation Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Noran Aly, Program Co-Chair

Noran Aly, MDP (She/Hers),  is an experienced Community Development Evaluation Practitioner and Economist by training, with almost five years of experience in quantitative and qualitative data analysis. Her focus is on measuring impact to support evidence-based and community-centered narrative building and decision-making, particularly through blending participatory evaluative approaches with analytical data modeling and visualization using tools such as STATA, R, NVivo, SPSS, and Tableau. Her work aims to bridge the gap between quantitative insights and the humane aspects of community development to measure culturally-centered impact. Currently, Noran serves as the Learning & Impact Strategy Manager at Greater Twin Cities United Way in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she provides strategic thought leadership in creating measurement indicators, impact evaluation frameworks, and retrospective shared learnings across various impact areas of education, housing, food security, and economic opportunity. Her role includes driving alignment of program-level evaluations with the organization’s overarching framework and disseminating utilizable annual impact data to diverse community stakeholders, from community members to donors to legislators and decision-makers. Previously, Noran worked as an Economic Researcher at the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development in Cairo, Egypt, where she monitored and evaluated key performance indicators of multiple ministries and public agencies.

Noran’s multinational consulting experience includes projects with the International Republican Institute in Washington DC, Rainforest Alliance in Guatemala, and El-Nidaa Foundation in Egypt. These projects involved qualitative analysis, grant proposal writing, export-readiness assessment report building, financial and economic cost-benefit analysis, and the development of strategic plans for sustainable development and governance.

Her academic credentials include a Master of Development Practice (MDP) from the University of Minnesota, and a B.Sc. in Economics with a Minor in Statistics from Cairo University, Egypt. She also attended a summer school at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she studied the intersectionality between Human Rights and Community Impact Evaluation as it relates to trust- based philanthropy. Noran has co-presented her work at regional conferences, including the International Conference for Sustainable Development in New York, and a workshop on encouraging and empowering youth-led narratives through impact evaluation at the American Evaluation Association 2024 conference in Oregon. Her co-published work focuses on export-readiness assessment and sustainable livelihoods in the Mayan Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala.

Kristin Van Dorn, Communications Co-Chair

Kristin Van Dorn serves as the head of client strategy and research for Bravery Media, a boutique agency focusing on digital strategy for higher education. Before Bravery Media, Kristin worked in user experience consulting and digital strategy roles across the University of Minnesota, including as an analyst in their world-class usability lab, where they facilitated over 80 unique evaluations per year. And, long before that, Kristin began her career in the nonprofit sector in fundraising and program management.

Kristin is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, earning her doctorate in Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Her research focuses on the predictors of effective citizenry. In her professional life, she blends her advanced academic research skills with user experience methods to provide teams with reliable and actionable user intelligence. She also provides operational consulting and planning services so that strategy recommendations are tethered to the capacity and workflows of their organizations.  

Courtney Schultz, Communications Co-Chair

Courtney Schultz directs monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning processes at All Hands and Hearts. AHAH is an international nonprofit providing community-inspired, volunteer-powered disaster relief, where Courtney works to understand, communicate, and continuously improve the impacts of relief efforts through participatory, community-based methods. She has worked with development organizations across sizes, sectors, and geographies to reach their goals and deepen their impacts. Believing in the strength of locally-led efforts, Courtney collaborates with communities around the globe to design and implement monitoring and evaluation systems that are driven by proximate voices. She is passionate about initiatives that are rooted and nurtured in local visions of positive, ongoing growth.

Kirsten Saylor, Communications Co-Chair

Kirsten Saylor is energized by growing plants, whether the carrot or the flower, as a way to build local relationships across culture and between species! Kirsten has supported community and school garden programs in the Twin Cities for over 20 years, through coordinating project development and through consultation on design, engagement, evaluation and planning of programs that connect people and planet. Kirsten has a masters in Applied Anthropology from Oregon State University and certificate in Program Evaluation from University of Minnesota. Kirsten finds balance in learning new yoga and strength moves, exploring vegan cooking and taking new adventures on water and land.

We are a volunteer board of directors who are committed to our local community of evaluators. Feel free to email us at info@mneval.org. We will return your email as soon as we can!

Thank you to our past presidents for their service!

2024 Alissa Jones

2023 Molly O'Connor

2022 Elizabeth Taylor-Shiro

2021 Claire Dunlap

2020 Maira Rosas-Lee

2019 Nicole MartinRogers

2018 Melissa Chapman Haynes

2017 Sarah Cohn

2016 Randi Nelson

2015 Ann Zukoski

2014 Rosemary White Shield

2013 Gail Mason-Chagil

2012 Leah Goldstein Moses

2011 Frank Schweigert

2010 Kathy Gilmore