Alicia LaChapelle-Friday, PhD

Co-Founder  ·  Research and Program Evaluation

I am a researcher, program evaluator and Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach with nearly 20 years of experience helping organizations find out whether their programs are working, and how to make them better.

My work sits where research meets practice. I have led evaluation and continuous quality improvement for behavioral health programs, co-designed research projects with community organizations, and led the qualitative analysis for an implementation study of a large urban school district’s social service initiative. I also worked with a statewide team of evaluators to establish a regional needs assessment that is now an annual report used for state addiction treatment and prevention policy.

I work across behavioral health, community mental health, schools, youth programs and child welfare, using mixed methods: statistical analysis, qualitative and grounded-theory research, implementation studies and evaluation studies. I teach graduate social work courses in community practice, leadership and research methods, and my research has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

I hold a PhD in Social Work and a Master of Social Work from the University of Houston, and a BA in English from Howard University, where I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. I am a member of the American Evaluation Association.

I lead with strengths in evaluation too: the most useful findings usually start with what a program and its people already do well.