Honing strategy and measuring success in order to maximize the impact of social services for low income communities.
Let’s drive change.
Diana Jensen, MPP
Diana loves to work collaboratively with key stakeholders to gain consensus on goals and strategy, plot feasible, effective paths to success, and develop meaningful measurement tools to support continuous improvement. She brings 20 years experience expanding and improving services for low income communities in the nonprofit and public sectors. She has in-depth subject matter experience in policy and services related to food security, older adults, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ older adults. She loves to learn about new things.
Located in Berkeley, CA
History
Diana began her career on the front lines of food security - answering phones on a hotline in Boston to screen potential food stamp applicants and refer clients to food pantries. After a move to San Francisco, she spent several years in program operations growing the San Francisco Food Bank’s weekly food pantry network. In that role, she implemented new consumer surveys in order to better understand the various programs’ impact and potential areas for growth.
After completing a Masters in Public Policy at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School, Diana worked for eight years as a planning analyst at the San Francisco Human Services Agency. In this role, she conducted countywide needs assessments, transformed administrative data into management reports and ad hoc analyses, developed logic models and evaluation strategies for new programs, and facilitated various task forces of diverse stakeholders to achieve consensus on needed service improvements across a variety of topics. In this role, Diana became known for her ability to generate easy-to-understand data analyses and marry them with findings from qualitative research, pointing decision makers toward the most promising alternatives to improve unmet service needs for low income seniors and people with disabilities.
In 2014, Diana returned to the San Francisco Marin Food Bank in an advocacy role. There, she provided leadership in strategic coordination, systems analysis, use of publicly available data to drive state and local food security policy improvements. She collaborated extensively with public sector administrators, nonprofit partners, and academic researchers. Upon request, she frequently provided training on strategies for leveraging existing data resources to hone understanding of program performance and opportunities for improvement. During this time, she also consulted with the California Department of Social Services on ways to better leverage existing data, through data visualization and workflow management, to improve CalFresh program delivery.
Since 2019, Diana has worked as an independent consultant, supporting a variety of non-profit and public agencies in policy, advocacy, research agendas, and operations.
