Welcome to the latest installment of Intention 2 Impact’s Heart-2-Heart — our monthly newsletter where we share what’s on our mind, in our hearts, and up our sleeves.

This month, we’re recapping the Mission Investors Exchange Conference, sharing wisdom from our mama’s, and giving a shout-out to our intern!

ON OUR MINDS

The Long Walk to the Investor Table 🪑

Last month, Nina and Kathleen made their second trip to the Mission Investors Exchange (MIE) biennial conference in Atlanta. If the first one was a warm welcome, this one felt like a full initiation… the kind that leaves you with more questions than answers, and around here, we count that as a win.

For us, the headline was: for the first time in 20 years, MIE’s conference made Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) a major theme. Not a panel. Not a side conversation. A throughline. Two decades of mission investors convening, and only now is measurement getting its own strand. It took a minute.

The “why now” is partly external: endowments are under scrutiny, payout questions are sharpening, and the gap between what foundations say they’re achieving and what they can actually show is harder to ignore. But the more honest answer is that IMM practitioners earned this seat by showing up year after year, translating between worlds that didn’t share a vocabulary, and strategically building the case that measurement isn’t a cost center. It’s the connective tissue between capital and the communities that capital is supposed to serve.

The deeper provocation: MIE turns 20 this year. AEA (American Evaluation Association) turns 40. Two milestone anniversaries, one big signal. If our field is going to matter in the next decade, the future of evaluation isn’t in our traditional corners. It’s in adaptation, demand generation, and integration with sectors that need us but don’t yet know how to ask.

And we want to get specific here, because “evaluators should be at the table” is a sentence that means nothing without follow-through.

IMM and evaluation grew up in different houses. IMM came up inside investing logic: portfolio-level, comparative, often metric-forward (IRIS+, IMP, the alphabet soup of GIIN). Evaluation came up inside program logic:  theory of change, context-specific, qualitative-rich, equity-centered.

Cue Romeo and Juliet, but make it nerdier. Each tradition has what the other lacks. IMM without evaluative rigor calls outputs outcomes and hopes nobody notices. Evaluation without investment context never leaves the grantmaking conversation, and investors politely nod and move on. Both sides know this. Neither has fully crossed the aisle.

What we saw at MIE is that the aisle is finally getting walked. Investors are asking for measurement across the entire investment cycle — not just at due diligence, not just at exit, but in the messy middle where learning actually happens and capital decisions actually get made.

That’s the part evaluators have been good at for forty years. We’ve been waiting in the wings, friends. The work we’ve been doing with mission investors and foundation portfolios lives right in this seam: bringing developmental evaluation sensibilities into IMM frameworks, helping investment committees use what their data is telling them instead of just collecting it.

Tonya Allen, President of the McKnight Foundation, didn’t mince words: “endowments are a tool for action, not a reason for caution.” She challenged foundation leaders to stop protecting their assets and start mobilizing them to protect communities. We wrote it down three times.

For measurement people, that line is a charge. When capital is finally moving with conviction, the evaluator’s job isn’t to slow it down with caveats — it’s to help it move better. Not gatekeeping. Not risk-mitigation theater. Rigor in service of getting dollars to the right places, faster, with eyes wide open.

It’s not lost on us that it took 20 years for evaluators to have a prominent presence at MIE.

So here’s the question we’re carrying home: where else should evaluators be planting seeds right now? AI accountability? The care economy? Movement infrastructure? Local journalism? Disaster response? Anywhere the work is moving fast, the stakes are high, and evaluative thinking is still showing up late?

Hit reply and tell us where you’re already showing up that the field hasn’t caught up to yet. We want to know. 

IN OUR HEARTS

Mother’s Day may have just passed, but the lessons our mother figures taught us? Those don’t expire. We took a moment this month to ask ourselves: “What’s one lesson a mother figure in your life taught you that shapes how you show up in your work?”

Not all of us are moms. But all of us have been shaped by one: a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a chosen family member who mothered without the title. Turns out, a lot of what makes I2I what it is traces back to those women.

Here’s what we said:

NINA: My mom always repeated 3 things that inform my worldview: stop and smell the roses, it’s all about perspective, and to always have faith/

KATHLEEN: My mom constantly reminded me to “leave things better than you found them.” This looked like her picking up trash on a hiking trail, leaving an Airbnb immaculate, or going the extra mile on a work assignment.

SAHITI: My Amma is a woman of few words and bold actions. Two things I carry with me into my work at I2I every day: care for everyone like my own, and to extend grace, always!

ASHLEY: ”Todo lo que hagas, hazlo con excelencia:. which means “all that you do, do it with excellence”

EMMA: My mom is an artist, so her knack for bringing stories, ideas, and emotions to life in a creative way has always been an inspiration. She taught me that often the most powerful and meaningful messages / stories are those that aren’t immediately evident on the surface, but take some “staring at the painting in the museum for awhile” time to feel and understand. 

VICTORIA: My mom always taught me about caring for others and making sure everyone is taken care of.  It is the strongest lesson I’ve learned from her because she rarely talked about it with words….it was just evident through her actions and the person that she is

NISHAT: My mom always says: “if you have said that you will do it and given your commitment, keep it with your all heart”

To all the mothers, mother figures, and those who have been mothered well, your lessons are living in our work whether you know it or not. 🌸

UP OUR SLEEVES

Last week, we cheered on I2I’s first GEDI intern, Nishat Akhi, as we graduated from the AEA Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) program. Cue Vitamin C’s one-hit-wonder. 

Over the past seven months, Nishat, a doctoral student in Education Policy and Leadership at Boston College, rolled up her sleeves and joined the I2I crew. She supported quantitative analysis for an evaluation of TED’s Audacious Project and offered Theory of Change support for the Decolonizing Wealth Project. For her capstone project, she leveraged an I2I project to design a systems map of Black-led intervention models reshaping early childhood education for Black and Brown children — work that’s now feeding directly into her dissertation. 👏👏

For two decades, GEDI has been building the next generation of culturally responsive evaluators by placing diverse doctoral students with host orgs across the field. Being a host has been a gift. Learning from Nishat has been the bigger one.

Her closing reflection at graduation said it best: “What I2I ‘gives’ to clients externally starts from what they build inside.” We’re holding onto that one. 💜