Emily McDonald

Emily McDonald is a proud alumna of Southeastern Louisiana University, where she obtained both undergraduate (2013) and graduate degrees (2015) in Sociology, in addition to participating in various research assignments and presentations within organizations affiliated with the Sociology and Criminal Justice Department. After her success in Hammond, she furthered her academic pursuits by enrolling at George Mason University located in FairfaxVirginia, where she recently graduated with her Ph.D. in Public Sociology after successfully defending her dissertation, Let Them Give: Philanthropic Infrastructure and Industry in the United States.

Emily is currently employed at The AmeriCorps' Office of Research and Evaluation as a Research Analyst. In this role, Emily assists the AmeriCorps at the state and national level, AmeriCorps Seniors, and AmeriCorps VISTA grantees build their capacity to evaluate their programs and build their research capacity to scale them with evidence. She works on evaluation curricula that are open to the public and she provides support for their offices’ research grant competition for higher education institutions. The research grants address knowledge gaps and develop innovative methodological approaches to researching national service and volunteering. Emily lives with her husband in Washington D.C., the political epi-center of the U.S., where she amusingly says that she splits her time “figuring out what the heck is going on with government acronyms,” trying to recover from the last presidential administration, and seeing if the current one can get anything passed.