The Learning Conference 2015

Tiffany is Manager of Impact and Learning at the Democracy Fund, a private foundation that fosters government of, by, and for the people. Tiffany brings research, evaluation, and policy expertise from academia, government, and the private sector. Most recently, she was a monitoring and evaluation specialist at USAID supporting the Feed the Future initiative. Prior to USAID, Tiffany was an American Psychological Association (APA)/ American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Congressional Fellow, where she negotiated with colleagues on both sides of the aisle to develop health policy. Prior to her work on the Hill, she was an evaluation consultant with Ray-Taylor and Associates, a writer and interviewer for the National Poverty Center, and an APA Policy Advocate. Tiffany completed a post-doctoral fellowship in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and obtained her PhD in social psychology from the University of Michigan.

Julia Coffman is director and founder of the Center for Evaluation Innovation. She has more than 20 years of experience as an evaluator, and specializes in evaluation that supports strategic learning, particularly for advocacy, public policy and systems change efforts. She is also co-director of the Evaluation Roundtable, a network of foundation evaluation leaders that seeks to improve how foundations learn about the results of their grantmaking and increase the impact of their work. For 15 years Coffman worked with the Harvard Family Research Project, a research and evaluation organization at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Coffman led HFRP’s evaluation work for over a decade, which included evaluating foundation and nonprofit initiatives and publishing The Evaluation Exchange, a nationally renowned periodical on emerging evaluation strategies and issues.

Tanya Beer is the associate director for the Center for Evaluation Innovation in Washington, D.C., which aims to build the field of evaluation in areas that are challenging to measure. In addition to publishing on emerging trends in the evaluation of innovative social change efforts, Beer works with foundations, nonprofits and evaluators to develop new evaluation tools, methods, and learning processes. She also serves as co-director of the Evaluation Roundtable, a network of foundation evaluation leaders that seeks to improve how foundations learn about the results of their grantmaking and increase the impact of their work.