Projects

Impact Charitable, a capital intermediary known to unlock capital and move it quickly to communities in need, was looking for a way to track its efforts across its diverse funding mechanisms; direct investments, special purpose investment funds, and more. Christina helped them to identify their impact principles and metrics. She worked with them to establish a process to ensure impact is a consideration at each stage of the investment process; due diligence, contacting, and management.

Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, needed a way to understand how their efforts were impacting the early care and education sector. Christina worked with them to identify a core set of key performance indicators and built an operating system to collect, track and manage the results of their daily efforts, the impact of their key initiatives, and to monitor improvements in the home-based child care sector at large.

Sundial Foundation, a new venture philanthropy firm investing in the root causes of the toughest social and environmental challenges, needed a strategy to measure and manage their impact. Christina worked with the organization to establish its IMM operating principles and tools to ensure IMM is an integral part of its due diligence, deal structuring, investment management and portfolio analysis.

The Pritzker Children's Initiative, which supports the work of organizations that make the case for policies and programs that impact the lives of infants and toddlers, needed a way to measure, track, and concisely make sense of how it was influencing decision-makers and policymakers working on issues related to prenatal-to-three. Christina helped the organization identify a core set of key performance indicators that could be monitored on a regular basis to determine progress and developed the tool needed to track progress on these KPIs.

Christina is helping Colorado Gives Foundation and Impact Charitable to map the experience of family, friend and neighbor child caregivers as they go through the process to contract with the Colorado Child Care Assistance Program and/or become licensed. The purpose is to identify any structural change – be it policies, practices, or resource flows – that could increase the number of FFN caregivers who receive public funding.

Alaska Center for Resource Families (ACRF) supports foster care and adoptive families across the state. They do amazing work, but knew they could do better. Spiral Impact interviewed dozens of families to produce a customer journey map — a visual that describes the emotional journey a family goes through as they decide and go through with adoption. Insights from the journey map allow ACRF to create innovations that better speak to the experience of families.

Christina has helped several organizations design approaches to gather feedback from the communities or customers they serve. She has designed surveys for human service organizations undergoing strategic planning, trained member-based networks on how to conduct focus groups, and more.

In 2021, Impact Charitable was playing an increasingly important role in designing and administering direct cash assistance programs. So too were many other organizations. Christina helped Impact Charitable to identify all the actors and offerings in the market in order to identify their unique positioning and value add.

Quality Influential Professionals, a network of home-based child care providers in Philadelphia, knew that providers were closing at unprecedented rates. On their behalf, Christina designed and conducted a mixed-methods research study to assess which factors were most likely to cause a provider to close. QIP is now able to provider services that address the high risk factors. View the research here.

In 2020, Impact Charitable, a donor-advised fund service provider offering capital-ready investment opportunities, successfully launched a program to provide $30M+ in direct cash transfers to more than 20,000 individuals overlooked by federal aid programs. The organization then wanted to expand its model to provide cash transfers to other communities in need. Christina researched and developed a best practice toolkit and recommendations for which communities are most likely to benefit from future direct cash transfers. As a result, the organization is launching a pilot to provide guaranteed income to friends, family and neighbor child care providers in Colorado. Christina advises Impact Charitable on its community engagement process, evaluation plan, and overall pilot implementation strategy. View the research here.

Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, is launching multiple pilots across the U.S to provide guaranteed income to friends, family, and neighbor child care providers. Christina supported Home Grown to develop a playbook for how to replicate these pilots in each new location. See Thriving Providers Project for more details.