Mytoan Nguyen-Akbar, PhD, is Founder/Principal of Community and Cultural Impact Partners, LLC, a recently formed entity with a focus on helping public sector agencies, community groups, and private foundations through rigorous stakeholder engagement, measurement, learning, and evaluation frameworks, and mixed methods approaches to help clients track, operationalize, and tell their impact story. Dr. Nguyen-Akbar spent 6 years in her role as Impact and Assessment Manager at the City of Seattle Office of Art & Culture (ARTS), and then subsequently, one year in the Mayor’s Innovation and Performance Team/City Budget Office. At ARTS, Dr. Nguyen-Akbar worked on grantmaking reports to the Arts Commission, developed an internal contracting audit with a justice lens, managed multiple field studies and reports on arts education, cultural space programming, creative economy stakeholder engagement and research, and cultural recovery funding reports. 

 

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. 

 

Mytoan 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.