About Us
Women-owned, strategy led.
KA Nicholas Consulting is a woman-owned, full-service evaluation, facilitation and planning consulting firm located in St. Paul, Minnesota. We provide tailored, strategic support to individuals, programs, and organizations that are working to build more equitable systems. We are motivated by a vision for a world where all can thrive, with a focus on people who have been harmed by trauma-inducing systems.
We’re here to help create a world where everyone thrives.
We’re cool-headed partners in the face of complexity.
Complex problems need creative solutions grounded in first-hand experiences. You need a partner who can help you make sense of the data you have and create a realistic strategy to gather the data you’re missing.
We translate complex ideas into stories that reflect who you are and what you do.
You don’t have a lot of time to get your point across to your key audiences. You need to have the right amount of information and the confidence to present it. We will help you identify the themes and insights that will resonate with your audiences.
We love numbers, but we know they aren’t everything.
We believe everything is data, you just need to know how to use it. We are skilled at weaving numbers and stories into insights that get to the heart of the problem and potential solutions. The result is findings that resonate with all your relevant interest groups.
Principal & Consultant
Kylie Nicholas
Kylie Nicholas is the Founder and Principal Consultant of KA Nicholas Consulting. Kylie is a skilled project manager with extensive experience facilitating evaluation and design processes. She is passionate about helping organizations develop evaluation strategies that tell the full story of the program’s work without burdening program staff or participants. Kylie has developed evaluation strategies for foundations, nonprofits, and government agencies.
For over 10 years, she has been drawing on her complementary backgrounds in program evaluation and the arts to develop creative strategies for gathering insights to help nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies understand and refine programs.
When she's not thinking about evaluation, Kylie is probably exploring her St. Paul neighborhood with her dog and toddler, digging in her gardens, or trying a new-to-us restaurant with her spouse.
Our Team
Kayla Meyers, Collaborating Consultant
Aaron Flicker, Collaborating Consultant
Aaron Flicker, PhD, MSW, LICSW (they/them) is our favorite collaborator for all things systems. Aaron is a systems evaluator and implementation strategist working at the intersection of policy, evaluation, and practice. They specialize in supporting organizations in building systems that are well-designed, usable, adaptive, and grounded in the realities that organizations face every day. Aaron is particularly drawn to complex organizational challenges, with a focus on creating clear, sustainable systems that support strategic decision-making over time
Kayla Meyers (she/her) is the first person we call when we need a collaborator for mixed-methods program evaluation, culturally responsive approaches, and building teams’ capacity to understand, use, and communicate their data. She excels at designing practical evaluation strategies that strengthen programs, support funding and strategic decisions, and tell compelling stories of impact. Kayla is an Evaluation Consultant, Coach, and Adjunct Professor with over a decade of experience helping mission-driven organizations turn messy data into clear, actionable insights.
Jill Lipski Cain, Collaborating Consultant
Mayah Blakely, Associate Consultant
Jill Lipski Cain (she/her) is our go-to collaborator for strategic planning and facilitation projects. She is a sharp strategist with deep emotional intelligence who specializes in building internal organizational empathy through strategic planning and building external empathy for staff and customers through better experience design. Her signature approach combines immersive research and evaluation, internal culture-building, and intuitive design thinking. She has a Master in Public Policy, training in Technology of Participation facilitation methods, and a professional certificate in User Experience Design.
Mayah loves developing innovative evaluation methods for community-based programs, and has experience designing a wide range of tools including surveys, observational protocols, and conversation guides. As an emerging evaluator in the field, she brings a fresh perspective on how data can be collected and how stories can be shaped and told, making them accessible to various audiences while keeping them rich and engaging, thereby telling the stories of communities. Mayah serves as the Student/Emerging Evaluator Representative to the Minnesota Evaluation Association.
Collaborate with us!
