Every change starts with a question.
Our Mission
Helping committed, mission-driven organizations and social change makers around the world ask the hard questions about how they can improve their work.
Why Wonderlight
We love questions. It is where the “wonder” in Wonderlight comes from. Questions are how we get from symptoms to solutions, from signals to real and lasting system changes.
And we don’t just like questions – we like the challenging, sticky “there is no simple way to answer this” type of inquiries. We like the journeys that are not guided by a single set of directions, but instead the ones that with many possible paths that all have pros and cons.
What drives our work at Wonderlight is helping our partners illuminate those forks in the road so that they can chart their own path. You know your ultimate goal; we help you identify the decision points and light the ways to get there.
About Courtney Tolmie
Bringing together experience as a practitioner, researcher, and advocate for change, I am passionate about building and using evidence to help those working around the world on hard challenges – improving health systems, fighting government corruption, supporting education for all – achieve their ultimate goals.
I began my career as an economist, earning my Masters in Economics from the University of Virginia while researching the incentives and challenges faced by community health workers in Mpumalanga and Limpopo Provinces in South Africa. Working with women seeking to have the greatest impact with little resources led me to move from the pure research space to work with non-profits supporting women’s economic empowerment and public health and ultimately working to combat government corruption and overreach to ensure people get the resources they need to survive.
For 12 years, I designed and led programs with Results for Development seeking to increase accountability and citizen engagement around the world, often using evaluation and adaptive learning as an approach to strengthen the way partners tackle these complex challenges. With Wonderlight, I continue to work on these issues, with a focus on three core areas of work: (1) Monitoring, Evaluation, and Adaptive Learning, (2) Open Governance, Accountability, and Community Engagement, and (3) Facilitation for stronger strategy and action planning.
