Kirsten Evans

Kirsten Evans has over two decades of executive leadership and management experience in the public, private, and non-profit sectors. She excels in growing strong, agile and integrated teams positioned to meet rapidly changing demands and evolving needs in growing organizations.

Most recently, Ms. Evans served as Director of the Center for Faith-based and Community Initiatives as Senior Advisor to the Administrator at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), where she led the agency’s outreach to global non-profit and community organizations on shared international development goals, drafting the agency’s first evidence-based policy on Strategic Religious Engagement in International Development.

Prior to USAID, Ms. Evans was the Chief Operating Officer of Educando by Worldfund, a non-profit organization building public-private partnerships to deliver STEM and English curriculums, enhancing the quality of public education in under-resourced communities of Mexico and Brazil. Before 2016, Ms. Evans served as the Executive Director of a leading Washington DC based organization advocating for the protection of religious and ethnic minorities in Northern Iraq and Syria, shaping US foreign policy to recognize the war crimes of ISIS as genocide. In this capacity she spoke internationally- including at the UN, EU, US Congress, and in TV, radio and print media- on the plight of targeted communities. She led a coalition team providing war crimes documentation, working hand-in-hand with international policy makers to secure political commitment for the protection of international human rights. Prior to this, Ms. Evans spent over a decade directing both educational institutions in Mexico, and education focused non-profits globally.

Ms. Evans holds Master Degrees from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in International Public Policy (SAIS), the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University of Rome in Religious Studies, the Anahuac University in Mexico City in Education and Development, and a specialization in human rights law from the University of Oxford.