Fierro Consulting, Inc.
Supporting collective learning for meaningful change
Our Team
Leslie A. Fierro, PhD, MPH
I am an evaluation practitioner and scholar with more than 20 years of experience. Originally trained as an epidemiologist, I became an “accidental” evaluator during my time with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the early 2000's and since then have immersed myself in learning how to make evaluation (including my own practice) more meaningful and impactful. I have had the pleasure to work as an employee or consultant in many sectors, including the U.S. and Canadian Federal governments; the private sector, philanthropic/non-profit, and academia. In these roles I have had the pleasure of engaging a range of scholarship and practice, including a review of U.S. federal agency evaluation policies, a study on evaluative thinking, research on organizational evaluation capacity (and measurement), and an evaluation of the Canadian Evaluation Society’s Credentialed Evaluator (CE) Designation.
Heather Codd, PhD, MPA
My professional journey spans nearly two decades in evaluation and public administration. During that time, I have worked for and partnered with government agencies in Canada and the U.S., academic institutions, and non-profit organizations to support strategic initiatives, lead and manage evaluation studies, and strengthen performance. Learning is central to my professional practice, and I aim to foster relationships and creative spaces to develop capacity, seek new insights, and discover innovative ways to create change.
About Us
Fierro Consulting, Inc., is a small evaluation firm whose members have
extensive experience designing and implementing evaluations and engaging with a variety of groups to learn about and from evaluation. We aim to enhance the health and wellbeing of communities and support all people in reaching their full potential.
We believe that evaluation is much more than a technical act. It is fundamentally about engaging in collective learning for a purpose. Well-crafted and implemented evaluations bring people together, including individuals with lived and professional experience, to help learn about what programs are doing well and where improvements are needed so that we are better positioned as a society to facilitate positive change in the things that matter most to us.
Our Core Beliefs
Our professional practice is guided by the core beliefs we hold about evaluation...
Evaluation can, and should, advance equity through how it is performed and through the results it produces.
High-quality evaluations seek, hear, and meaningfully incorporate the experiences and viewpoints of individuals who design and implement the initiatives undergoing evaluation and the individuals affected by these initiatives.
Strengthening individual and organizational capacities to support high-quality evaluation is critical to producing, sustaining, and using evaluation to its fullest potential.
Our Services
Evaluation
We co-design and co-implement evaluations with individuals who influence, conduct, and are affected by the program/service/policy being evaluated. Together we identify meaningful questions, decide how to produce insightful evidence, and collaborate on moving those findings into action. We particularly enjoy evaluations where there is a desire to strengthen existing evaluation capacity through learning by doing.
Strengthening Evaluation Capacity
We help organizations create environments that support the conduct and use of high-quality evaluations. We offer a variety of services tailored to non-evaluation and evaluation audiences such as workshops; coaching; communities of practice; assistance writing evaluation requests for proposals, policies, and frameworks; data literacy sense making sessions and more.
Example Projects
We have worked with a variety of clients in the government and non-profit sectors. Examples include:
- Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC)
- Council of State & Territorial Epidemiologists
- Safe States Alliance
Recent Workshops
- Introduction to Evaluation Capacity Building at the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) 2024 Summer Evaluation Institute
- 2-day session on Building Evaluation Capacity in Organizations at the American Evaluation Association 2023 Conference.
Recent ECB Projects
- Co-leading the refresh of CDC’s Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health
- Writing and publishing a fully-online e-textbook for CDC - Planting the Seeds for High-Quality Evaluation in Public Health
Example Evaluations
- Evaluation of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) Sub-county Assessment of Life Expectancy Project.
- Evaluation of New Data Sources for CDC’s National Syndromic Surveillance Program.
Clients’ Experiences
“The workshop was fantastic. Great inputs, great discussions, great dynamics between theory and exercises.”
~Workshop Participant
“Best workshop I have been to. I loved being able to work independently but check in as needed. I am very happy with the amount of material. I have a lot of ideas to take home.”
~Workshop Participant
“Fierro Consulting, Inc. showed an outstanding ability to listen and take complex, often academic concepts, and translate them to accessible, easy to use templates, tools, and graphics. The resulting products have been loved by our grantees, who often note that they have shared widely with others at their public health departments and with their partners.”
~ Evaluation Capacity Client
Contact Us
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