Maxwell alumnae co-host podcast, interview Maxwell’s Leonard Lopoo
A podcast produced by Glass Frog Solutions, a
New York City-based firm that provides program evaluation services to local
nonprofits, is hosted by Rebecca Casciano ’03 MPA and Jennifer Puma ’03 MPA. In the most
recent edition of the podcast, they interviewed Leonard Lopoo, Maxwell Advisory
Board Professor of Public Policy and director of Maxwell’s Center for Policy
Research.
Casciano and Puma spoke with a panel of
experts, including Lopoo, about new trends and academic developments in program
evaluation. Their hour-long conversation covered topics ranging from the
importance of being open to not just the positive but also critical results of
evaluations to the necessity of understanding the interdisciplinary benefits
program evaluation is able to provide.
After Maxwell, Casciano spent a decade at
Princeton University as a PhD student in sociology and as an associate research
scholar. Her research uncovered that, despite being asked by external
evaluators to measure their impact, nonprofits did not have the resources or
expertise to do so. Frustrated by this, Casciano founded Glass Frog in 2012
with the goal of making her research insights actionable. The company has
helped organizations working on complex social and economic problems improve
their internal research and evaluation efforts. Over the past seven years,
clients have included Teach for America, Blue Engine, the New York Restoration
Project, and Hillel International.
Puma was previously at Booz Allen Hamilton,
where she worked closely with a large number of federal government clients in
both business development and relationship management roles. She joined Glass
Frog in 2014, and is currently its senior manager for operations and client
delivery. In this role she manages the organization’s projects by helping their
nonprofit clients implement and manage the evaluation frameworks they have
developed together.
You can listen to their podcast and find more
information about Glass Frog’s projects on their website.