JOIN OUR Community of Practice: Design Evaluations That Bring Your Purpose to Life
Are you passionate about creating meaningful change in your community? Do you want to design evaluations that go beyond fulfilling requirements to actively advance your mission? Whether you’re new to evaluation, an ‘accidental evaluator,’ or a seasoned leader looking to deepen your skills, the ALAE Community of Practice will help you design evaluations that align with, reinforce, and embody your purpose through learning, adapting, and living your values.
Launching in 2025, the ALAE Community of Practice is a cohort experience for changemakers committed to designing evaluations that truly matter. This isn’t about templates or checklists—it’s about creating evaluations that align with your values and help you drive meaningful change.
Through group sessions, small-group collaboration, and one-on-one coaching, you’ll develop actionable evaluation frameworks, gain tools for inquiry and reflection, and build the confidence to lead transformative work.
But this is more than just evaluation—it’s about creating a cohesive, purpose-driven process that integrates strategic planning and program design. By embedding evaluation into your projects, you’ll foster clarity, connection, and greater impact.
Sound like something you’ve been looking for? Read on to learn how the ALAE Community of Practice can transform the way you and your organization approach evaluation.
What is ALAE?
ALAE (Align, Learn, Adapt, Embody) is a transformative framework that integrates evaluation with your values, vision, and purpose. It turns evaluation into a tool for reflection, growth, and action by recognizing that learning is a continuous process:
Align: Root your evaluation in your values and purpose, creating a clear foundation.
Learn: Use inquiry to uncover insights and explore challenges with curiosity.
Adapt: Respond to complexity with systems thinking and flexibility.
Embody: Translate your findings into purposeful action, living your values through your work.
What Makes ALAE Different?
ALAE stands apart because of its unique integration of nature as a teacher and its focus on the inner and outer work necessary for meaningful change.
Nature is Our Teacher
LAE draws on the wisdom of nature, using trees as a powerful metaphor for the evaluation process. This connection helps ground the work in a way that is intuitive, accessible, and deeply meaningful:
Soil & Roots: Represent alignment, grounding you in your values and purpose while drawing strength from the gifts and resources already present in your environment.
Trunk & Bark: Symbolize learning, supporting growth and exploration while emphasizing the need for protective measures to nurture health and well-being.
Branches & Leaves: Reflect learning as it evolves into core strategies, and the ability to adapt those strategies across diverse contexts, responding thoughtfully to nuance, change, and complexity.
Fruit & Seeds: Represent embodiment—where efforts yield tangible, meaningful outcomes—and the birthing of new possibilities, as ideas take root and begin to grow change in new places.
This metaphor reminds us that evaluation is not just a process—it’s a living system, interconnected and dynamic.
We Focus On The Inner And The Outer Work of Evaluation
Evaluation is often seen as an external process—measuring outcomes, assessing impacts, or generating reports. ALAE challenges this notion by integrating inner work into the process, recognizing that sustainable change begins with the changemaker.
Inner Work: This involves self-reflection, exploring your values, assumptions, and intentions. It’s about aligning your purpose with your actions and cultivating the resilience, clarity, and adaptability needed to navigate complexity.
Outer Work: This includes the strategies, frameworks, and actions you take to create tangible change. It’s about translating your values into practices, engaging with others, and making measurable impacts.
By combining these, ALAE helps participants get clear about their sphere of influence—a dynamic balance between personal growth and collective transformation. As your inner alignment strengthens, your capacity to lead, adapt, and embody purpose in the world grows.
The result? Evaluations that not only reflect your purpose but also reinforce and expand it, creating ripples of positive change within and beyond your organization.
Why Focus on Evaluation In 2025?
Evaluation is a powerful tool for growth and accountability, but it’s often misunderstood. It can feel disconnected from daily work, treated as an isolated activity to satisfy funders. ALAE changes this by bringing evaluation into alignment with your purpose and using it to strengthen your strategic planning and program design. When you approach evaluation with clarity and intention, it can:
Strengthen Strategic Planning: A solid evaluation framework ensures your planning stays connected to your purpose.
Enhance Program Design: Insights from evaluation make your program design more relevant, adaptive, and effective.
Create Coherence: By integrating evaluation, planning, and design, you eliminate silos and create a unified, values-driven approach to your work.
Evaluation isn’t just about data or reports—it’s about creating a roadmap for growth and action.
WHAT WILL COHORT MEMBERS DO?
The program will guide you through key evaluation principles and practices:
Orientation & Project Introduction: Align your project ideas with your core values and set intentions for the program.
Aligning Values and Actions: Explore how your values shape effective evaluation and ensure purpose-driven outcomes.
Inquiry as a Tool for Learning: Use creative inquiry methods to uncover deeper insights into your work.
Data Analysis: Learn to make sense of data and apply it meaningfully to drive decision-making.
Adapting with Flexibility: Embrace systems thinking to respond to complexity and emerging challenges.
Embodying Change: Move from reflection to action by living your values through your evaluation practices.
Final Refinement & Next Steps: Sharpen your evaluation framework, reflect on learning, and define actionable next steps.
What WILL COHORT MEMBERS GAIN?
Practical tools and resources to design evaluations that align with your purpose and drive meaningful results.
A supportive network of changemakers to collaborate with, exchange ideas, and grow alongside.
Expert insights and personalized coaching from Dr. Nora Murphy Johnson, a leader in transformative evaluation.
The confidence to use evaluation as a powerful tool for reflection, growth, and impact.
The outcome? A tailored evaluation framework for your project or program, along with the guidance and support to bring your plan to life.
Flexible Pricing
We believe evaluation should be accessible to organizations of all sizes. Flexible pricing is available and varies depending on the overall revenue of your organization. Visit our website for more details about costs and payment options.
Program Dates
The ALAE Community of Practice runs quarterly, with new cohorts forming regularly. Visit our website for upcoming dates and details.
Is This Program Right for You?
The ALAE Community of Practice is designed for individuals who:
Believe a better world is possible and want to use evaluation to help create it.
Have a project to plan, design, or evaluate—even if it’s still in its early stages.
Are ready to engage deeply and collaborate with others in a spirit of mutual support.
Embrace openness, adaptability, and grace.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
Learn More: Visit our website to explore how the ALAE Community of Practice can help you achieve your goals.
Sign Up: Join the next cohort and start designing evaluations that bring your purpose to life.
Still Have Questions? Schedule a free 30-minute session to see if this opportunity is right for you.
