Evaluation Associate: K-12 & Higher Education Portfolios
Research Interests
- Contextually-responsive program evaluation to maximize utility and highlight systems-level features
- Evaluation capacity-building to promote data-driven decision-making and equip organizations with the tools to tell their impact story
- Empowerment evaluation to support communities in pooling existing assets to solution-seek
- Youth-focused evaluation to meaningfully center those who are the intended beneficiaries responsible for sustaining programs long-term
- Facilitation & sense-making with clients and broader communities to collect and interpret all types of data
Biography
Olivia Melvin is an Evaluation Associate at the Center for Research Evaluation on the K-12 and Higher Education portfolios. Olivia leads program evaluation and evaluation capacity-building projects with non-profit, philanthropic, government, and academic partners. Olivia views evaluation as a mechanism to meet communities where they are in their data-literacy journey, building capacity and prioritizing empowerment evaluation strategies along the way. Olivia is a young and emerging evaluator within the first five years of practice. She is also a 2021-2022 graduate of the EvalYouth Global Mentorship Program, learning a wealth of theoretical and practical evaluation strategies from nearly 100 global mentors and fellow mentees. She strives to blend regional, national and international monitoring and evaluation practices in ways that are most responsive to cultural and contextual community needs. Olivia serves as the current Chair of EvalYouth North America (Feb 2024-Feb 2026) and the Gulf Coast Eval Network Mississippi State Liaison (Jun 2024-Jun 2025), aiming to highlight disparate networks of young and emerging evaluators and Gulf-based evaluators while providing access to development & professional community for folks interested in entering and building careers in the field. Her academic background includes a B.A. in International Studies and Mandarin, and she is also pursuing an M.A. in Political Science (International Conflict & Peace Studies) at the University of Mississippi.
Education
B.A. International Studies, The University of Mississippi (2020)