David Owen, M.Ed., President

Throughout his career, Dave has been dedicated to helping youth, families, communities, and the organizations that serve them thrive and succeed. For more than 25 years, Dave has worked in direct service, administrative, and consulting positions at organizations such as Federation Employment Guidance Service, Institute for Student Achievement, New York City Outward Bound, and the United Nations Development Program.

As Coordinator for the Central Park Conservancy’s Experiential Education Program, Dave developed successful programs and partnerships with hundreds of schools, businesses, and youth-serving agencies. Under his leadership, program enrollment grew by seven-hundred percent to serve over three thousand youth and adults each year. Dave has also worked as the Assistant Director for FEGS Youthworks, an intensive youth development and work-study program for high-risk youth based in New York City and Israel. While at Youthworks, he helped design, implement, and evaluate a high-impact curriculum that provided life-skills training, mentoring, experiential education, and professional skills development to participating high school students.

Dave holds a Master's Degree in Human Development and Psychology specializing in Adolescent Risk and Prevention from the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. While at Harvard he learned practical applications for integrating cutting-edge research on risk, resilience, and prevention programming for children and adolescents in both school and community settings. Dave also completed coursework in non-profit management and accounting at the Kennedy School of Government. As an academic tutor and intern counselor for Project IF (a partnership program between Harvard and Mass. General Hospital), Dave helped raise math scores and improve social outcomes in students from an inner-city Boston high school.

In 1999 Dave founded Owen Consulting Inc., and has been helping clients lead successful educational and social-impact initiatives ever since. He has served as Team Leader to the United Nations Task Force on Adolescents and Youth in the Republic of the Maldives, where he led research efforts to create a UN National Human Development Report on Youth. Dave has also consulted to work-based youth mentoring programs run by companies such as Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse Asset Management, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Bank of America, and consults regularly to mentoring organizations throughout the NYC area. He served as a member of the Mentoring Partnership of New York’s Young Professional Advisory Board, and has presented at numerous educational, philanthropic, and business seminars.

An alumnus of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), Dave is also a former NY State Licensed rock climbing guide and Wilderness First Responder with more than 30 years of personal and professional outdoor education and climbing experience. Dave's commitment to helping people stems from his own experiences as a youth participant in wilderness leadership programs, and in working as a teacher overseas. As an adult he still loves to head into the mountains and travel whenever possible.

Jessie Clyde, MPH, managing Director

Jessie has worked in global health and human rights for over 20 years, with extensive experience leading initiatives that strategically use data, evidence and learning to inform programming and advocacy across a range of issues.

 With a focus on strengthening civil society, Jessie has built the capacity of organizations to design, implement and evaluate programs. Through work with partners in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, she understands how to balance an array of needs across politically, ideologically, culturally, and geographically diverse settings. Deeply committed to meaningfully engaging local communities to address structural and systemic barriers to social change, Jessie leverages her skills in listening to, learning from, and co-creating solutions with local partners to advance human rights. Through recent work with the International Women’s Health Coalition (WHC), Jessie has led the design and implementation of a multi-million dollar grantmaking program to advance women’s rights, with a focus on the Global South. She oversees the program’s monitoring and evaluation framework (including objectives, expected results and data collection approaches) for over 40 grantee partners in approximately 20 countries.

 Prior to IWHC, Jessie worked as a Program Officer for International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF/WHR), where she provided distance and on-site technical assistance on programming and evaluation to IPPF/WHR Member Associations in Latin America and the Caribbean. She has strong global partnerships with health care and education professionals, academics, researchers, and philanthropic organizations, and leverages those relationships to refine her evaluation frameworks and strengthen programming. Focused on using data to inform decision making and strategic direction, Jessie has led high-performing teams that bring rigorous and practical approaches to evaluation efforts. She collaborates with a broad array of partners to develop clear measurement models; define expected outcomes; design and implement evaluation frameworks; and provide evaluation and research technical assistance. As a thought leader in social justice and philanthropy spaces, Jessie expertly communicates results to a wide array of audiences and facilitates spaces for learning and reflection with the end goal of ensuring informed decision-making at all levels.

 A native English speaker, Jessie has full professional fluency in Spanish. She holds a Master of Public Health degree from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Georgetown University.

Maeve Powlick, Ph.D., Scientific director

Maeve has worked with public schools and districts, community-based organizations, and government agencies as a consultant for 15 years. For six of those years, she was also a full-time faculty member at Skidmore College, teaching interdisciplinary courses in research methodology (Participatory Action Research, Geographic Information Systems, and Statistics), Economics, Gender Studies, and Mathematics. As part of her dissertation research on the role of young people as actors and agents of change in economic development at the community level, she taught a year-long course on Participatory Action Research at Harvey Milk High School, a New York City Transfer School.

Upon completing her PhD in Economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2011, Dr. Powlick moved to consulting work full-time in order to work directly in community development. Her consulting work has focused on building effective partnerships across sectors, incorporating data collection and analysis into program practice at all levels of program operation (including direct service as well as program administration and leadership), and continually improving program approaches through data and input from youth, parents, and other stakeholders. She has worked on evaluations of more than 40 school and center-based program sites, using a collaborative, mixed-method approach to evaluation.  Additionally, she has evaluated larger projects such as the New York City and Rest of State 21st Century Community Learning Center Technical Assistance Resource Centers and federally-funded, multi-city grants (such as and Office of Innovation i3 grant).

Maeve specializes in working with diverse groups of stakeholders to develop mission- and vision-aligned metrics and develop research instruments.   For example, Maeve worked with the New York City DOE office of Students in Temporary Housing, charged with ensuring that more than 80,000 homeless children and youth in New York City are able to attend school, to idenfity common outcomes for homeless youth and develop strategies for improving data collection and use of data in city-wide decision-making.  She worked with Wediko Children’s Services and a multi-lingual group of stakeholders develop a consensus-based logic model for their mental health work.  She has worked with two communities preparing Promise Neighborhoods applications to develop locally-relevant measures aligned with the Promise Neighborhoods key indicators. 

In the past eight years, she has worked with community-based organizations and local governments to write and lead teams to write more than $150,000,000 in funded grant applications at the local, state, and federal level. 

Catherine LaLonde, MPH, impact evaluation director

Catherine has 14 years’ experience working on, designing, managing and evaluating complex, multi-country, multi-site projects across Africa and in Haiti.  She has worked with the full spectrum of organizations, from small, grassroots organizations to large international NGOs, to national organizations partnering with their department of health to implement nationally scaled health programming. She has designed, managed and evaluated service delivery programs spanning the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, non-communicable diseases, poverty alleviation, health in crisis settings and with displaced populations; as well as programs advocating for access to essential medicines and services, increased budgets for health and more transparent budgeting processes.

Most recently, Catherine led the development of quality standards and indicators for abortion and contraceptive services in low resource and humanitarian settings. This role required soliciting feedback from a technical working group of experts in the field representing 13 countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa.  She is currently leading the pilot for the standards in Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Palestine in early 2021.

Catherine is a problem solver, adept at using evaluation to help organizations identify blockages that limit the impact of their work and finding opportunities to drive improvement. She collaborates with partners to:

●      Assess project and program performance;

●      Assess and build institutional capacity for monitoring evaluation;

●      Get off-track projects back on track;

●      Design research and evaluation methodologies, particularly those that seek meaningful participation of key stakeholders and beneficiaries;

●      Review and present evidence on emerging practices, minimum standards and best practice;

●      Assess data quality and quality improvement processes;

●      Assess organizational gender equity and advise on gender equity strategies;

●      Develop evaluation plans and identify indicators;

●      Design programs; and

●      Develop theories of change.

Catherine has a Master of Public Health from the University of British Columbia and is fluent in French.

Jimmy Jung, Ph.D., statistical evaluation director

Jimmy is an educational psychologist with 20 years of experience in K-12 and higher education, with a passion for using predictive analytics to improve student and organizational outcomes. His areas of expertise include program evaluation, advanced statistical modelling, policy development, and strategic planning.

Over the course of his career, Jimmy has served as program evaluator for the New York City Department of Education, focusing on dual-language, literacy, and summer programs. He has also worked as a director of planning and assessment at Baruch College, conducting research on student transition from high school to college. More recently, he has served in executive-level positions at the The College of Brockport, the University of Maine, and New Jersey City University. Some of the programs that he has developed and implemented include, mentoring for first-generation students, assessing and addressing the social emotional factors related to college success, and increasing financial funding for low-income students. 

His expertise has made him a highly sought-after consultant to non-profit organizations nationally and internationally on using data to improve policies and outcomes. In addition, Jimmy holds a faculty appointment at Rutgers University, and has held previous appointments at New Jersey City University, the University Maine, Baruch College, and Hunter College, where he served on dissertation committees, developed research grant proposals, and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in education, statistics, and psychology.