An American Sign Language (ASL) STEM game, a real-time math support platform and a screen-free interactive device to empower children with special needs to say their first words—these are just three of 20 current entrepreneurial ventures supported by Camelback Ventures, a nonprofit who invests in and supports under-resourced entrepreneurs who work for social impact. 

For 10 years, Camelback has accumulated significant learnings about what works in supporting proximate leaders–entrepreneurs who are closest to the problems they’re solving. But now Camelback is entering a pivotal stage of growth where building out a robust, data-informed evaluation is essential to deepening their impact, amplifying their thought leadership and sustaining their operations through earned revenue. Yet they lack the evaluation infrastructure to systematically capture and share those insights. 

With a 2-year partnership funded by Camelback Ventures, Friday Institute for Educational Innovation Director Callie Edwards will serve as a trusted evaluator, translational research leader and strategic thought partner for the organization to provide evaluation support and increase their impact.

“I am very excited about this project because it’s allowing me to think innovatively with new partners that I haven’t had a chance to work with before,” said Edwards, director of program evaluation and education research and director of strategic initiatives at the Friday Institute. “This project requires a different level of creativity and application and it presents new challenges for me as someone who has been in the field for over 10 years. It provides new ways to apply research and evaluation strategies and approaches in new contexts.”

The Friday Institute has been a consistent innovator in translational research, bridging research, practice and policy in meaningful ways. This partnership between the Friday Institute and Camelback exemplifies an innovative research-practice partnership model—one that enhances financial stability, grows national presence and strengthens applied research impact. Edwards’ work with Camelback will build research capacity to communicate impact, improve evaluation infrastructure and deepen integration of evidence into strategy and program design.

Camelback accelerates the social impact of ventures led by proximate leaders, aiming to create a more varied social innovation ecosystem that leverages the genius of all people. They identify leaders with promising ideas and empower them to enact change within their communities through an intentional blend of coaching, capital, connections, community and curriculum. 78% of Camelback’s portfolio consists of education ventures, including schools, edtech companies and community-based organizations. With more rigorous evaluation systems, Camelback can support these ventures and the students, educators and communities they serve. 

“We realized we couldn’t just offer capital and community; we needed to build evaluation as a core competency both internally and for our portfolio,” said Melvin Freeman, vice president of AI, technology and data at Camelback. “The timing was right because we’d reached a maturity as an organization where we had the insights worth sharing, and our fellows had reached a stage where funders were demanding more sophisticated impact measurement than many early-stage ventures are equipped to provide.”

Camelback’s fellows have consistently voiced the need for stronger evaluation capacity to secure funding, measure impact and scale their work. Edwards’ role will provide Camelback with the expertise to meet these needs by designing internal evaluation systems, piloting services for fellows and exploring pathways to revenue through strategic partnerships and grant development. 

“Callie stood out because of her impressive background leading complex evaluation projects, but more importantly, her entrepreneurial mindset meant she could meet ventures where they are in their evaluation maturity,” said Freeman. “She doesn’t just do evaluation; she thinks strategically about how evaluation can unlock opportunities, build credibility and drive mission. That combination of rigorous methodology, community-centered approach and ability to work across different stages of organizational development made her the ideal partner.”

Edwards is an award-winning research methodologist and strategic education leader with more than a decade of experience leveraging mixed research methods (qualitative and quantitative) to improve outcomes across K–12 systems, higher education, community-based organizations and state government agencies.

A large goal of this partnership is for fellows to receive the support they need to measure impact, make sophisticated analyses and to secure funding to scale their work to make even larger impacts on their local communities.

“[Our] leaders are often implementing the most innovative and contextually relevant solutions, but they haven’t always had the evaluation infrastructure to prove it,” said Freeman. “Callie’s work helps us change that, not just by measuring impact, but by building the field’s understanding of what works when you center the leadership of people closest to the problems. When these ventures can demonstrate their impact with rigor, they secure more funding, reach more students and shift how the broader education system thinks about who should be leading change.”