Our Story

Ronda Zakocs founded Insight Evaluation after a career in academia. In 2008, recognizing a need for her expertise among nonprofit organizations and foundations, she jumped from Boston University’s “ivory tower,” trading teaching and research for more hands-on consulting. After convincing her family to relocate to her home state of Oregon, Ronda began pursuing her passion for social change by applying her evaluation expertise and academic background to complex social issues.

From the start, evaluation was the core of Insight Evaluation.  We soon realized evaluation wasn’t enough.  Among the issues:

• traditional program evaluation limits social innovation;

• systems change efforts are better poised to address the root causes of social inequities; and

• designing, executing, and evaluating systems change is HARD!

To address these learnings, we expanded our evaluation consultation expertise around system change making. Consequently, we approach social change strategy with an evaluation mindset, a unique combination that allows our clients to become more impactful and effect greater change in their communities.

In 2018, to better reflect the breadth of our consulting practice, Insight Evaluation was renamed Insight for Action.

In 2019, Katie Winters, PhD joined the organization and Insight for Action shifted to a co-principal model.