Chikako Yamauchi

Chikako Yamauchi is a strategic learning and evaluation officer at The Kresge Foundation. She supports the foundation’s program and practice teams by developing and refining strategies, fostering cross-team collaboration and drawing insights from data to advance equity. She joined the foundation in 2021.

Before joining Kresge, Chikako served as senior manager of evaluation, research, and strategic learning at a Los Angeles-based nonprofit intermediary, where she led a team designing and facilitating a learning consortium that brought together funders, public agencies and nonprofit leaders to better support community capacity strengthening. Chikako previously served as research and evaluation manager at a nonprofit organization where she co-designed and co-facilitated community innovation labs in multiple US cities. Her career in the nonprofit sector began as a professional dancer and arts administrator, and creativity continues to inform her approach to learning and unlearning, facilitation and strategic thought partnership.

Chikako holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), a master’s degree in Pacific Islands studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Chikako is a member of the Northern and Southern California Grantmakers’ Racial Equity Action Institute’s 2021 cohort. She served on the EPIP Los Angeles steering committee from 2018-2021 and was a 2017-2019 Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow.