Madeline Brandt, MPH

Practitioner Coach

 

Madeline (she/her) is a writer and researcher based in Portland, Oregon. 

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Most recently, Madeline served as Research & Learning Officer at the Oregon Community Foundation, departing in 2023 to work on her first novel. While at OCF, Madeline evaluated several of the foundation’s multi-year initiatives, supporting field-building, knowledge sharing and advocacy. Previously, Madeline led nonprofit community health programs in settings as diverse as City Hall, WIC Clinics, and a women’s prison. 

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Madeline has a Master’s Degree in Public Health with a focus on Health Communication from Tulane University and a BA in sociology from the University of Washington. Madeline is known for her approachable style, creative writing, and dexterity with puns. On the weekends she moonlights as an amateur forester, working with her family to steward 30 acres of forestland in rural Washington State.

 

Madeline is guided by the memory of her grandfather, Robert Matthews Johnson, the longtime executive director of the Wieboldt Foundation. Bob believed in philanthropy’s potential to promote equity and justice, and he funded racial justice initiatives and reproductive rights organizations as early as the 1960s. Bob spoke passionately about the field’s responsibility to elevate communities as experts of their experiences, take big risks, and invest in changemakers. He wrote extensively about the role of evaluation in philanthropy, urging evaluators not to be overly precious about their work, to commit to transparency and learning as a field, and to use evaluation as a tool for good. Bob’s “35 Keys to Effective Evaluation” (written for the Council on Foundations in 1993) hang above Madeline’s desk.