Community and Cultural Impact Partners works in research and scholarship across community, public, philanthropic, and private sector stakeholders. We help create meaning, field build, measure, assess, monitor, and evaluate grants, contracts, and other community investments.
Our work happens through deep listening and assessing data and operations, thoughtful inquiry, data analysis, mixed methods, framework building, high-level engagement, and by bringing a warm, relational and strategic social impact lens.
We offer technical assistance and coaching to organizations at different stages of their journey to fulfilling their strategic formal and informal goals.
We are a senior-level majority BIPOC collective, minority-woman owned, queer-centering, and based in Seattle, WA, with partners across the country.

Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, Ph.D

Principal/Founder

Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, PhD, is a systems thinker and doer, with more than 22 years of professional experience across government, higher education, cultural programs, teaching, and research at different scales.

In the Seattle Mayor’s Office, Dr. Nguyen-Akbar helped develop digital tools, organizational change management, mass communications, and documentation of promising practices for recruiting and supporting minority-owned businesses. This effort required the transformation of citywide procurement, a complex and multi-level stakeholder engagement that required data and digital transformations at all processes of government procurement. -Grew up in Northern California and has over 20 years of social science research, policy and evaluation, teaching/lecturing, and scholarly publishing experience mainly in the US, but also while living abroad in Australia, Chile, and Vietnam. -- She earned her BA in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley and PhD in the Sociology of Race and Inequality at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she was trained by leading experts in qualitative and quantitative methods of research and community engaged and participatory research methods. Dr. Nguyen-Akbar has been awarded the American Sociological Association Minority Predoctoral Fellowship, a Mellon Graduate Fellowship, multiple Foreign Language and Areas Studies grants, the Midwest Sociological Society’s Jane Addams Award, Fulbright Fellowship, Lois Roth Foundation fellowship, and Society for the Study of Social Problems Global Section’s Best Graduate Paper Award.

Research Affiliates

Ricky Reyes, MA

Kara Wentworth, Ph.D

Affiliate

Ricky Reyes is a Chicago-based, Seattle-born researcher, creative, oral historian and arts administrator. Trained in digital humanities, coding, and data analysis at the University of Chicago (M.A. in Digital Studies of Language, History, and Culture), public administration at Seattle University, and oral history methods through the Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, Ricky’s research explores assumptions on race, class, and gender that produce real-life impacts on those at the center of structural oppression and using storytelling and data as a vehicle. Rick’s work experience includes community outreach, project management, and data analysis with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Seattle Black Spatial Histories Institute, the University of Chicago, Seattle University, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, Tacoma Division of Community and Economic Development (Arts & Cultural Vitality), Wa Na Wari and WA-BLOC Seattle.

National expert on media impact and nonprofit impact measurement Human and equity-centered design facilitator Facilitates theory of change and impact framework development processes for doc film, social justice, media and arts nonprofits Executive Director of The Nonprofit Center, leading firm of 60+ consultants and facilitators Filmmaker and performance artist Queer intersectional creative approach

Anh Thang Dao-Shah, Ph.D

Affiliate

Anh Thang Dao-Shah, PhD, was born in Vietnam, grew up in Germany and Poland and earned her Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Dr. Dao-Shah has 10 years of experience in research, teaching, and consulting in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging with a special focus on the cultural and healthcare sector. Her consulting clients include the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, Akonadi Foundation, Grantmakers for the Arts, the Federation of States Humanities Council, California Council for the Arts, DataArts/SMU, the City of Berkeley, the National Folklife Network, and National Farm to School Network. She served as the Senior Racial Equity and Policy Analyst at the San Francisco Arts Commission, where she led the agency to pass the first racial equity action plan in the City and County of San Francisco. She was also the first Director of Health Equity at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Dr. Dao-Shah currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, a non-profit organization in San Francisco that aims to connect artists of the Vietnamese diaspora with the diverse audience of the Bay Area. Dr. Dao-Shah is a published writer with academic essays, poetry, and prose featured in Positions, the Vietnamese Studies Journal and multiple anthologies and textbooks.

Audrey Querns

Affiliate

Audrey Querns is an experienced arts education data specialist and additionally, has had extensive experience doing project management and helping organizations design and deploy essential systems. Audrey facilitates conversations among diverse internal and external stakeholders to build a vision and plan for action in which all voices are reflected, and actions are bold, clear, and achievable. After an early career at Amazon where she rose from customer service representative to senior project manager for all aspects of starting new customer service centers in the US, Europe and Japan, Audrey switched over to supporting public and non-profit agencies including Seattle Public Schools, Seattle Public Library, Seattle Housing Authority, 4Culture and ArtsFund. Since then, the through-line of her work has been a focus on planning and implementing innovative programs in which public, private, and non-profit agencies collaborate for the benefit of children and youth.