25 years of
EXPERIENCE
We stand ready to help you achieve your evaluation goals.
Our Approach & Values
Our approach is collaborative and utilization-focused to help ensure that our services are practical, relevant, and ultimately useful to our clients.
We believe that to constantly strive to incorporate participatory, equitable, and rigorous mixed-methods approaches into our projects is to help guard against institutional and individual biases in evaluation designs, processes, and results.
This belief is central to our work and supports the organizational values that we hold dear: to use evaluation as a tool for learning, empowerment, and equity for vulnerable and underserved populations.
Clarus evaluation projects are:
Collaborative & Participatory: We expertly facilitate the active involvement of key stakeholders in the evaluation process, including service recipients, service providers, and funders.
Utilization-Focused: We clearly identify the intended use of evaluation results up front. This remains the guiding force behind all evaluation decisions throughout the life of the project and ensures that limited evaluation resources remain efficiently focused to achieve their main purpose.
Culturally Respectful and in Service of Equity: We appreciate the diversity of cultures in the communities in which we work. We engage diverse voices throughout the evaluation process and identify important contextual and cultural dimensions that are important for the evaluation to address. We employ principles, questions, and methods to explicitly assess the effects of policies and programs on the underlying systemic drivers of inequity.
Mixed-Methods: We combine qualitative and quantitative methods and sequence them appropriately to achieve truly integrated, mixed-methods evaluation studies. Our mixed-methods approaches guard against single-method deficiencies and aid in the interpretation of evaluation findings.
Timely & Efficient: Our track record for finishing projects on time and within budget is spotless. We plan carefully and execute precisely. When unexpected circumstances arise for our clients that require extended project timeframes and revised scopes of work, we pride ourselves on always being flexible and accommodating to achieve their goals.
Our History
Clarus Research is a small woman-and-minority-owned business that includes highly qualified professionals with extensive experience developing and evaluating programs for social change.
When co-founders Jane Yoo and Kristin Ward launched Clarus in 2009, they had the primary goal of working together to provide high quality evaluation services for organizations striving to improve the circumstances of vulnerable individuals, families, and communities.
Over the past decade, we have expanded our Clarus family and are proud to have met our secondary goal of supporting like-minded individuals, in particular female entrepreneurs interested in striking out to start or expand their own evaluation, applied research, or other businesses. In so doing, Clarus has broadened our reach, our network, and our capacity to help clients reach their goals of achieving positive outcomes for society.
Our Team
We convene customized teams to develop evaluation approaches and frameworks tailor-made for every project. Our team members are selected from among our national network of expert consultants to ensure that every project benefits from the full complement of methodological and content expertise. Our team has decades of experience in such areas as child welfare, behavioral health, secondary and post-secondary education, interpersonal violence, justice and policing, juvenile, legal services, housing and homelessness, and environmental conservation.
