Welcome Ana Tellez, Program Manager for Partnerships

I'm excited to welcome Ana Tellez as our program manager for partnerships. She joins our innovation and partnerships team as we work to refine the role that research plays in solving social problems and build a culture of public impact at Stanford and beyond. Our team supports Stanford Impact Labs’ programs and the faculty and partners we invest in. We look for new ways to improve and scale our model including expanding engagement with external partners. And we facilitate frank (and joyful!) conversations about what works and what doesn’t to help us—and others—learn about and improve the impact of our model and investments.  

Ana brings extensive experience in advancing racial justice within public health practice. She spent the last two years working closely with local and state health department leaders supporting their capacity to: 1) shift organizational culture and internal systems to advance equity, and 2) establish community accountability processes that support power-building approaches. She’s an emergent strategy practitioner, a lover of podcasts, and a recovering communications director.

Here’s a little more of what we do in Stanford Impact Labs’ innovation and partnerships team:

1. Support Stanford Impact Labs’ programs investments with tools, coaching, and connections to put their science to use for society. We provide faculty, partners, and students who participate in our programs or receive Stanford Impact Labs’ start-up funding with the people and partnerships that will help them put their research expertise and insights to use for society. This includes connecting them with our robust network of practitioners, policymakers, and funders to help them understand where and how they can best contribute to the social problem they are working to address. We also give them playbooks, templates, and in-depth case stories about what other impact labs have done and create opportunities for peer-to-peer learning. 

2. Find new ways to improve and scale our model. We’re self critical. We’re constantly exploring ways to implement and scale our teams’ insights and interventions in different contexts and push our model in new directions. We foster relationships with individuals in academia, philanthropy, government, community, and the private sector to build a robust network of advisors, stakeholders, and potential collaborators. These connections help us understand answers to questions like: What makes certain research-practice partnerships more effective? How are we centering equity and justice in our work? How can we create participatory grantmaking models where communities affected by the issues make investment decisions?  And many more. 

3. Run frank (and joyful!) learning and impact sessions. We facilitate highly-interactive sessions and an iterative learning agenda to deeply understand: what is the role of research in solving social problems? Are solutions out there but we need research to align behind advocacy for those solutions? How can research be better informed and support policymakers and advocates working in communities? We aim to make these sessions frank and joyful to learn what works and what doesn’t to help us—and others—learn about and improve the impact of our model and investments.

Have ideas or questions for our team? Send them to Ana and me at stanfordimpact@stanford.edu.