About Natalie
An evaluator passionate about social justice, 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 privileged to have deep family roots in Italy and Colorado. Natalie’s 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 in accomplishing their goals.
Natalie De Sole (she/her) was born to parents who both built their careers in international public health efforts. 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 social justice issues to which she remains wholeheartedly committed 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. She followed her passion for social justice 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 of a few past projects include:
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- a three-year federal grant for a 0 – 5 early kindergarten readiness initiative in Macomb, MI
- a two-month nonprofit-funded capacity building project for a youth creative self-efficacy program in Detroit, MI
- a six-month nonprofit-funded youth leadership and education project in Detroit, MI
- a five-year federal grant for a university-based TRIO program called Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD) in Detroit, MI
- a one-year New York community college-funded online community of practice aiming to transfer teaching techniques to improve outcomes for students in a remedial class located online
- a one-year funder’s grant focused on testing mechanisms to use social media to spread successful high school teaching practices among teachers based entirely online
- a six-month systems-level impact evaluation of a funder’s five-year review of their impact on the health system across multiple portfolios in Colorado
- an eight-year funder’s change effort with state-level higher education institutions to reduce the graduation gap for underrepresented students in multiple states
In early 2018, Natalie desired to change how she engaged in evaluation. After years of reading books on positive psychology and learning environments, she launched Rooted-Growth to increase her use of participatory approaches in evaluation, center learning, and incorporate social justice principles learned during her Master’s. Utility is a core value, as she discovered that organizations spend thousands of dollars on program evaluations, which they hardly use 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.
Natalie's expertise helped us to analyze the effects of our multi-year youth development. Her skill around conducting focus groups, capturing that data and generating easy to read reports of our findings was invaluable to us, especially for writing grant reports and presenting findings to key stakeholders.
