Amani Austin (she/her), founder of Austin Advocates With, is a culturally responsive evaluator and program development leader with a deep commitment to racial justice and continuous quality improvement. Amani has much experience in community driven work with a deep knowledge in multicultural education and access to opportunity. She has been persistent both in research and in practice in cultivating brave spaces that are equitable and diverse. Amani has 12 years of youth development experience within the nonprofit sector and 10 years of research and data experience engaging communities of color. Amani is a process-oriented systems thinker with a human centered approach. Her collaboration style lends well to team leadership models and prioritizes an iterative process of making revisions and including reflection time within the evaluation process. When it comes to her facilitation skills, she aims to create brave space for folks by setting the stage and making room for diverse perspectives. In collaboration with evaluation, she has experience conducting research and facilitating racial equity-focused training related to inclusive workplace culture, mentorship, youth development, measuring impact, and accountability for organizations. The field of culturally responsive research and evaluation has given her important tools to be able to cultivate, honor, and bring attention to the voice of communities of color. Amani holds a BA from California State University of Northridge in Urban Studies and Planning and a MPP from Portland State University in Policy Analysis with an emphasis in Education and Racial Justice. She is a current board member of the Oregon Values and Belief Center and a board member for HOLLA Mentors.

Nick Gilla braids technology, interdisciplinary research methods, and political advocacy to ask big questions, uncover hidden systems, and develop strategies that will stand tests of time and politics. Nick is a queer, Romani+white man from Texas. From 1997 to 2014, he built, supported, and maintained large, open-source technology solutions while keeping his advocacy work with BIPOC and queer communities to volunteering. From 2014 to today, he has redirected toward his broader goals of building complex yet accessible methods and tools for anti-racist policy development. He has supported scholarly research projects, run data science and program evaluations for Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), served on advisory committees for multiple regional/state data initiatives, and provided recommendations for Portland's implementation of the Modernized Anti-racist Data Ecosystem (MADE). His seven years at NAYA working on hundreds of grants has been an accelerated crash course in community needs, challenges, and solutions; on the setbacks inherent in dominant ways of collecting, organizing, and reporting on community stories; and on theoretical and practical solutions to telling those stories while meeting upstream demands.