Tom Schwandt was one of those rare people who made you feel smarter just by being in the room with him...and then made sure you did something with it. As our Board Chair-Elect and a trusted mentor to our Executive Director, Tom brought decades of wisdom as a professor and evaluation scholar to every conversation about this organization. He never let us settle for vague ambitions. His signature challenge was to resist the temptation to measure everything and instead pick the few things that truly tell the story of whether families are better off — and then keep our eyes on them.

That discipline shapes how this dashboard is built. It is why we track a handful of numbers with care rather than filling pages with data and demographics. Tom would have wanted it that way (& probably even a little shorter).

We miss his calming presence, his probing questions, and his mischevious sense of humor. We try to honor him by continuing to ask the questions he would have asked.