Since 1989, ORS Impact works alongside renowned social impact leaders, supporting their work to accomplish their missions.
Since 1989, ORS Impact has been on the cutting edges of measurement, evaluation and strategy, helping our clients be better-positioned to realize the change they seek. We make the complicated accessible, bringing new research and new approaches to meaningful work, delivering the insights our clients need to move from ideas to impact.
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Staying at the forefront since 1989.
Founded by Jane Reisman in 1989, ORS Impact is now led by CEO Sarah Stachowiak and a leadership team that is proud to continue the traditions and values that Jane created the company upon.
“ORS Impact helped surface some really important questions, particularly for leadership. We valued their insights as well as their excellent work.”
~ Foundation Director of Research and Evaluation
ORS Impact is based in what is now called Seattle, Washington. There are many ways to understand the significance of place and what place means in the context of our work—where our staff live, where home is for them, where our clients live and work, and where the communities at the very center of our work are located—and the relationship between place and people over time. These aspects show up in everything we do, and we must pay respect to the Indigenous peoples who have stewarded this land for generations.
We are on the occupied, ancestral, and contemporary lands of the Coast Salish, Stillaguamish, Duwamish, Muckleshoot, Suquamish, and many other Tribes who have made their homes in and around the Puget Sound. We recognize each of these Tribes, with their distinct peoples, histories, cultures, and languages, and honor their ways of knowing and being as key to our collective existence. To do so, we must hold ourselves accountable in two ways: first, we must situate ourselves within the legacy of colonization; second, and more importantly, we must be accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity.
As an organization, we have much learning and unlearning to do, and we come to this acknowledgment knowing that it is one of the many steps we must take on our journey to be in real relationship with the Indigenous peoples in our region and the land itself. If we don’t acknowledge the continued legacies of colonization and violence enacted upon Indigenous peoples and their land, we will further erase their history and humanity. And in that erasure, we remove our own culpability in these histories and our subsequent impacts on the land. In that same breath, acknowledging the ongoing process of oppression, we must also recognize the joy and inherent power that Indigenous communities continue to cultivate.
As evaluators, our work has historically been anchored in western ways of knowing, rooted in oppressive notions of being the neutral and most valid way to understand and make meaning of the world. It is essential that our work and the work with any organization we partner with commit to expanding values, assumptions, and methodologies that are foundational principles in the field of learning and evaluation. We are working toward decolonizing our perspectives, integrating methods rooted in Indigenous.