Rest as fuel for a new decade, new chapter
As I depart the California desert on the heels of a series of retreats and a milestone birthday, I'm finally feeling settled into the new year.
These trips have provided me with a kind of deep rest that I haven't experienced since departing my home 10 years ago for a two-year adventure in Bangkok. Back in 2014, that period of adventure with my partner and the open exploration of a professional idea resulted in me creating a consulting practice that would eventually become MXM Research Group. Now in 2024 and the Year of the Dragon, I'm feeling fueled up for a new decade and our team's next transformation as we settle deeper into our values, gifts, and ways of collaboration with all of you in the social sector in Boston and beyond.
What am I creating space for? A preview:
We are changing our name to Data+Soul! Since we launched our tagline last year, ‘data + soul’ has breathed new life into our ways of working together as a team and our understanding of how we can best support our social sector partners. We are excited to adopt it as our new name to better represent our what and how.
Our current practice will continue; nothing about our services will change. We will deepen our offerings in evaluation, facilitation, and program design under Data+Soul Research. You can learn more about how we're applying ‘data + soul’ to our evaluation practice through the case studies on our current website.
Later this year, we will launch Data+Soul Studio, a makerspace for collaborative learning and idea testing for fellow evaluators, researchers, and data scientists.
A growing team. Over the past year, we’ve welcomed six brilliant team members, including finance and operations staff to build and sustain necessary infrastructure for our evaluation team. We'll open up a few more eval positions this year.
Being in conversation with you all about how ‘data + soul’ can better show up in the research and evaluation ecosystem. Upcoming presentations include: We’re presenting at the PEAK Grantmaking conference in late March and Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) Conference in May. We're also running a #dataplussoul workshop at the AEA Summer Institute in June. Would love to bump into new and old friends - let me know if you'll be at any of these!
I have so much gratitude and admiration for those who have been a part of my refueling and inspiration.
Stay tuned! I'm excited to reintroduce you to the Data+Soul team this spring. For now, you can follow us on LinkedIn and subscribe to our newsletter at Data + Soul (dataplussoul.com).
