Headshot of Mary Kojima
Senior Consultant
Mary is passionate about designing and implementing thoughtful, responsive, and useful evaluations. She has experience helping mission-driven organizations including Girl Scouts River Valleys and a teen pregnancy prevention organization to improve programming, demonstrate impact, and better serve their communities.

Expertise

Evaluation

Mary has led evaluation projects in the nonprofit sector focused on positive youth development, bringing to her work experience in designing high-quality tools, collecting qualitative and quantitative data, analyzing results, and creatively sharing findings to ensure they are useful to clients. She grounds her work in the ultimate benefit to communities. Mary particularly enjoys the design phase of an evaluation because it allows her to dig into the context and needs of clients and communities. She is adept at finding patterns and themes in organizations’ work, making meaning of them, and telling the powerful stories of mission-driven work.

Consulting

Empathetic and curious, Mary prioritizes relationship-building in her work and strives for partnership, collaboration, and shared meaning in her projects. She values the unique experience and perspectives each individual brings to a project and works to create pathways for people to share these important insights.

Professional Experience

The Improve Group | St. Paul, MN | Senior Consultant | 2024-present | Plans, leads, and implements project activities to make the most of information, navigate complexity, and ensure clients’ investments of time and money lead to meaningful, sustained impact. 

The Improve Group | St. Paul, MN | Associate Consultant | 2022-2024| Worked collaboratively with project teams to execute activities. 

Girl Scouts River Valleys | St. Paul, MN

  • Research and Evaluation Analyst | 2019-2022 | Developed, conducted, and managed evaluations across all operations functions to demonstrate the measurable impact of programs and identify opportunities for improvement.
  • Funded Program Analyst | 2018-2019 | Monitored delivery, dose, and reach of all funded programs to ensure grant requirements were met.

Teen Pregnancy & Prevention Partnership | St. Louis, MO

  • Program Intern | 2017 | Developed, implemented, and evaluated trainings on the National Sexuality Education Standards to provide educators with age-appropriate health promotion activities.
  • Capstone Partner | 2017 | Conducted a literature review and key informant interviews with health providers to investigate barriers and facilitators to long-acting reversible contraception uptake among adolescents.

Education

College for Public Health and Social Justice, Saint Louis University | Master of Public Health in Maternal and Child Health (Academic Achievement in Public Health, Delta Omega, Alpha Sigma Nu)

University of Wisconsin-Madison | Bachelor of Science in Nutritional Sciences with a minor in Global Health

 

Want to learn more about Mary? Check out their full resume here!