Valerie Threlfall

Valerie Threlfall is Principal of Ekouté. Her consulting approach is informed by more than 15 years experience working as a nonprofit practitioner and leader within highly successful startup organizations. Valerie created her initial consulting firm in 2013, establishing an early presence in the Bay Area’s nonprofit youth and education space. In 2015, she was engaged by the Fund for Shared Insight to help design and lead what has become their signature initiative, Listen4Good. This initiative has scaled rapidly to be a leading capacity building program on feedback practices, serving more than 400 nonprofit grantees nationwide.

Prior to creating Ekouté, Valerie served as Vice President and founding director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) YouthTruth initiative, scaling the project from an idea described in a two-page memo to a nationally recognized nonprofit that captures and shares youth perspectives with school leaders to inform change.

After leading the landscape analysis that justified YouthTruth’s development (in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Valerie designed the YouthTruth pilot and expanded it four-fold within two years. Under her leadership, YouthTruth surveyed more than 125,000 students from 215 schools across 28 districts/networks over three years and produced tangible improvements in participating schools. To date, more than 85% of participating educators have used YouthTruth data to inform their programmatic and policy decisions.

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