About Natalie
Natalie De Sole works with mission-inspired groups who want to learn from data and lived experiences to reach their goals.
Raised abroad in Africa, Natalie is proud of her deep family roots in both Italy and Colorado. Her multicultural background made her conscious of different perspectives due to age, race, ethnicity, gender, culture, location, education, and lived experiences. She sees evaluation as a critical tool that can elevate perspectives and support organizations to accomplish their goals.
Our Mission
Rooted-Growth engages clients in a structured process that supports and normalizes learning as part of ongoing work.
Natalie’s Story
Natalie De Sole (she/her) was born to parents who both built their careers in international development. She grew up in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, and Zimbabwe. A dual-national (American and Italian), Natalie transitioned to life in the US when Zimbabwe’s political and economic instability escalated to historical levels. After an idyllic childhood, this challenging time left a lasting mark. She began volunteering with nonprofits or nonprofit-like organizations. The experience opened her eyes to disparities within the United States which influences her professionally and personally.
After completing her undergraduate education, Natalie worked with progressive grassroots campaigning efforts out of college. This time further bolstered her belief that elevated voices and united action create powerful change. While she supported a spectrum of efforts, two major focuses related to environmental justice and international humanitarian efforts. She followed her passion to a Master’s in Social Work at the University of Michigan. An 8-month internship in the Monitoring and Evaluation department at Save the Children’s South African program helped determine her future course. Recognizing the importance of identifying implementable solutions to issues based on information, she embraced the Program Evaluation and Social Policy track.
Since 2011, Natalie has worked with evaluation firms focused on quality evaluation work for nonprofits, foundations, institutions, systems, and collaborations. These evaluations ranged in various ways, most focused on education, health, and development for children and youth aged 0 – 24. Examples include a three-year federal grant 0 – 5 early kindergarten readiness initiative in Macomb, MI; a nonprofit-funded two-month youth creative self-efficacy project in Detroit, MI; a five-year federally funded TRIO program called Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) with a university; and a funder’s eight-year multistate policy change effort with higher education to reduce the graduation gap for underrepresented students.
In early 2018, Natalie launched Rooted-Growth to engage in evaluations useful to their decision-making and organizational goals. In her work, she discovered that organizations spend thousands of dollars on program evaluations, which they hardly used effectively. Her cross-cultural and global experiences have taught her that there are different interpretations of data, all of which can help identify the truths behind it. Rooted-Growth moves past a report that sits idly on a desk. Engage your stakeholders’ voices and use findings to help you learn, grow, and make sustainable changes. The majority of Rooted-Growth’s work thus far relates to education and prevention science (see recent work). Her PhD from Colorado State University in Education focuses on youth development, measurement, and transformation.
The benefits of working with Rooted-Growth:
- Learn about your successes
- Pair the expertise of your organization, youth, and community with research theories and methods
- Build your capacity to conduct work internally
- Facilitate and unpack findings and empower clients to know their strengths and areas for improvement
- Translate on-the-ground experiences to staff, administrators, board, and the larger community
