Learning and Evaluation Associate

Location: St. Louis, MO office; currently 3+2 hybrid schedule

Position Type: Full-time, exempt

Travel required: None

Compensation: Salary range: $100,000-$110,000. Benefits paid in full, including generous employer-paid premiums for health, dental, vision, and disability insurance. Additional benefits include professional development assistance, tuition assistance, student loan repayment assistance, paid company holidays, paid time off, paid parental leave, and a retirement plan with employer contribution.

To apply: Please submit a cover letter and resume or CV via email to eval-jobs

The James S. McDonnell Foundation (JSMF) envisions a thriving St. Louis region where inclusive economic growth drives shared prosperity and enhances the quality of life for all. Guided by its mission to advance economic mobility for St. Louisans facing the starkest disparities, JSMF invests in four areas essential to the region’s long-term success: workforce, small and mid-size businesses, wealth building, and the civic infrastructure needed to design and implement lasting economic solutions.

Founded in St. Louis in 1950 by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell, JSMF has awarded more than $600 million in grants to date. For more information about JSMF’s mission and the work of its funded partners, visit jsmf.org.

The Learning and Evaluation Associate will play a crucial role in supporting the Foundation’s evaluation efforts and learning initiatives. This position is essential for enabling the JSMF team and its partners to work with various sources of evidence, promoting ongoing learning for transformative change. This role has three main responsibilities:

• Provide evaluation, technical assistance, and support to grantees
• Conduct mixed methods data collection and analysis
• Communicate findings and insights to promote continuous learning and guide investment and program decision-making

The primary role of the Learning and Evaluation Associate will be to design, manage, and implement technical assistance to strengthen grantee capacity for data collection and analysis. Technical assistance should enable grantees to structure data, analysis, and reporting to align with Foundation goals, collect meaningful data, and promote shared learning. This role will apply a shared measurement strategy to gather and report information that offers valuable insights to both grantees and the Foundation.

This includes designing and delivering technical assistance support, such as
1) one-on-one consultations on developing outcomes, key results, and meaningful measures,
2) creating or sharing tools, templates, and resources for data collection and analysis, and
3) providing office hours, coaching sessions, and facilitating peer learning among grantees.

This role will utilize mixed methods of data collection and analysis to deepen understanding of lived experiences and the factors that drive change. This includes conducting interviews and focus groups, analyzing grantee data and interviews (e.g., coding and thematic analysis), and triangulating qualitative and quantitative data to produce insights and findings for reports, briefs, and presentations.

This role will contribute significantly to presenting and translating results in dissemination and learning products (such as data interpretation sessions, emergent learning opportunities, reports, dashboards, briefs, charts, and data visualizations) that highlight trends and insights in formats tailored to the target audience(s). This position will lead the development of components of the mid-year and annual reports, as well as the measurement dashboard, to ensure that data communication and learning opportunities generate new insights to enhance grantmaking and organizational performance.

Additionally, this role will support the JSMF team’s facilitation of information exchange with team members, grantees, and organizations to develop a deeper, action-oriented understanding of regional issues and inform the…