The Collaboration Conference 2015

Cris Kutzli is a Program Director at Grand Rapids Community Foundation, and serves as Co-Director of the Challenge Scholars initiative.  She participated in the design of Challenge Scholars, and now leads its program and evaluation components.  Her work with Challenge Scholars includes program planning, strategy development, and partnership building at both the systems and grass-roots level.  Cris also advises the Community Foundation’s Youth Grant Committee. She is involved in a number of local initiatives related to education, youth development, and college access.  Prior to joining the Foundation in 1999, Cris served as a community organizer at a large neighborhood association in Grand Rapids. Cris earned her Bachelor of Arts in Social Science Education at Michigan State University. 

As a director in FSG's Strategic Evaluation approach area, Srik is part of the firm's Leadership Group. Srik's role includes supporting and advancing FSG's thought leadership in Strategic Learning and Evaluation, as well as contributing to other impact areas. He is currently involved in a range of projects, including developmental evaluation and shared measurement, as well as leading FSG's intellectual capital around "next generation evaluation."

Srik is a trained facilitator and has worked with multiple stakeholders to build organizational capacity to use data and metrics to plan, implement and evaluate interventions. He has led developmental, formative and summative evaluations, as well as projects around organizational design, strategic planning and leadership development. Prior to joining FSG, Srik worked in the education field for nine years, most recently serving as Chief Impact and Learning Officer at New Teacher Center, a national nonpofit with a mission to accelerate teacher effectiveness. In this role, Srik worked to set up frameworks for impact measurement as well as systems and processes for data-driven learning and organizational improvement. Prior to New Teacher Center, Srik worked on supporting whole systems change in public education as Director of Evaluation for the Ball Foundation. Prior to working in education, Srik's experiences range from manufacturing operations to strategic business consulting, allowing him to bring a unique perspective to the field of social change.

Hallie Preskill, PhD, is a Managing Director with FSG, where she oversees the Strategic Learning & Evaluation practice and advises on evaluation and learning projects with foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and government organizations.

Prior to joining FSG, Hallie spent more than 20 years in academia, teaching courses in the theory and practice of evaluation, training and development, organizational learning, appreciative inquiry and consulting. Hallie’s books include Becoming the Change (2011), Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry (2006), Building Evaluation Capacity: Activities for Teaching and Training (2005, 2^nd Ed. 2015), Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting (1999, 2005), and Evaluation in Organizations (2001, 2009).

 Dr. Preskill was President of the American Evaluation Association in 2007. She received the American Evaluation Association's Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002 and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. Hallie holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign