Arete Evaluation Collaborative is a collaborative consulting firm focused on evaluation, research, and program development that is committed to helping people gain wisdom about their work, help programs improve, contribute to evaluation through intercultural perspectives, and help good programs better contribute to human flourishing.

Our collaborative is named after the greek word arete (ἀρετή), pronounced ah-rey-tey, meaning ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’. In our work, we seek to provide excellent service to our partners and clients guided by virtues we regard as important in our work such as kindness, discernment, empathy, integrity, justice, perseverance, and honesty. We are also keen to understand the values and virtues our partners and clients uphold or are seeking in their work and to allow  these to clearly influence the evaluation process through consideration of the mission and values of our partner organizations, the principles that undergird the programs we are evaluating, and the outcomes that are desired in the implementation of a program or project.

Arete Evaluation Collaborative aims to provide evaluation, research, and program development for our clients in order to determine the impacts that these clients create due to their project work. The clients that we typically work with are non-governmental organizations, public agencies, universities, and foundations, however, we are open to working with any type of organization including the private sector. Our team has experience in summative, and formative evaluation. In order to perform a comprehensive evaluation on occasion we may use a combination of the summative and formative evaluations. Our approach uses participatory/collaborative evaluation, utilization focused evaluation, values reflective and engaged evaluation, and realist evaluation to further enhance our services to our clients.

The Arete team, most of whom are alumni of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, hail from many different countries and are able to work in many languages and in many different countries. Our members are professionals with strong experience in evaluation and related areas, from a variety of backgrounds, who share a vision of producing well-done and useful evaluations for clients, and who possess experiences and capacities to lead in planning, conducting, and reporting on an evaluation. As a collaborative, the impact areas that we work in are intercultural/international education, rural livelihoods, youth livelihoods, community development, public health, and higher education. However we are open to working in other impact areas as well.

Moreover, Arete is built on our core values that signify that our team is dedicated to working with our clients to ensure a smooth working relationship.  In addition, we are willing to work within an organizations’ budget, and look to be an honest and hardworking partner to organizations interested in improving their programs and contributing to the common good.