ActKnowledge

Theory to Results

ActKnowledge has an 18 year history providing program evaluation and planning services to nonprofit organizations in the United States and elsewhere. ActKnowledge is an S Corporation registered in the State of New York. Its place of business is the Center for Human Environments of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York at 365 Fifth Avenue in New York City. ActKnowledge’s founder Heléne Clark worked closely with the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change to develop the “Theory of Change” concept emerging in the 1990s and 2000s in the evaluation field into a body of practice and theory that could be applied to evaluation, visioning and program planning.

ActKnowledge’s evaluation practice has developed a particular specialty in Community Schools. We have an 18 year relationship with The Children’s Aid Society, one of the originators of the community school model of primary education. ActKnowledge has conducted multi-year Theory of Change-based evaluations for the Society’s community school programming at sites in New York City. Partly through our association with The Children’s Aid Society and the Aspen Roundtable, we have gone on to conduct multi-year evaluations (based in Theories of Change) for community school programming in Paterson, New Jersey, Hartford, Connecticut, and for the New York City Community Learning Schools Initiative, a program of the United Federation of Teachers. We are always seeking new opportunities to apply our evaluation and Theory of Change program modeling practice.

ActKnowledge is also called upon to apply its Theory of Change and monitoring and evaluation expertise with clients in the international development arena, having, in the past year, worked with the World Bank’s financial inclusion group “CGAP,” the USAID contractor Chemonics, and UNICEF, and, in past years, with ORBIS, The Hunger Project and the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. International Development agents such as the UK’s DFID, USAID and AUSAID are increasingly interested in incorporating Theory of Change methodologies into their work. We are very excited by these developments and have learned a great deal about the uses and limits of Theory of Change in the international development arena.

Thanks in part to a seed grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and subsequent support from the Rockefeller Foundation ActKnowledge has developed and brought to the field a web-based software, Theory of Change Online, or TOCO, to support organizations and practitioners in effective development, application and management of Theory of Change.

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