As the Associate Director of Learning and Evaluation, Ali leads the Foundation’s Learning and Evaluation efforts. Her role involves partnering with the Foundation grantmaking and investment teams to articulate the strategic direction and goals of our portfolios and developing methods to assess progress towards these goals and surface real time learnings, with a focus on being agile and leveraging results to inform future decision making. Ali also oversees efforts to foster data and evaluation literacy and promote a culture of data-driven grantmaking across the Foundation. By cultivating partnerships, disseminating key findings and advancing evaluation, Ali intends to amplify the Foundation’s influence in higher education and philanthropy by advancing evaluation, cultivating partnerships, and disseminating key findings.  

Prior to joining ECMC Foundation, Ali was a Senior Consultant at Engage R+D, where she supported foundation clients to measure the impact of their grantmaking at the programmatic, community and systems level. She is passionate about driving social change through the support of data and evaluation and believes achieving impact at scale requires a commitment to continuous learning, research and evaluation. 

In addition to expertise in learning and evaluation, Ali also brings professional experiences working directly with communities to her role. She began her career in New York City working as a high-school college counselor and youth social worker. Ali holds a Master of Social Work from Hunter College and a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and English literature from Boston College.