Meet Jason Torres Altman

What brought you or led you to TerraLuna? How did you get here?

When I joined TerraLuna, the opportunity gave me the chance to serve educators  doing meaningful work in K-12 classrooms in different regions of the United States. I had just completed a challenging turn as an internal evaluator at a large corporation making products for K-12 educators and students. The  opportunity to support work directly with educators was appealing. I had spent enough days buried in an Excel spreadsheet analyzing user data, the opportunity to speak with, observe, and listen to educators discuss their needs proved fulfilling in those early years. Six years later is it still the engagement with educators that TerraLuna creates that drives my work.

This is more important than ever on a personal level, as we continue our work during this pandemic. It isn’t as easy getting out of bed, and switching on the computer each day, in this endless series of days that all look exactly the same. It helps so much that our clients are out there trying to propel positive benefits for teachers and students. Specifically, educators are more stressed than ever: a recent survey we completed showed major issues with educators having basic needs met from Maslow’s Hierarchy - like safety, sleep, and fulfillment. Fortunately, most of the programs that we support are designed to make their work lives better.

In a way, our support is as important as ever as educators try to navigate very complex and constantly changing environments in school buildings, only enhanced by COVID-19. Frequently, our statewide clients see vast differences in what the thing they do looks like from building to building. As a result of the way we do our work at TLC, we can approach our support with flexibility, prioritizing new needs that would never have been on the horizon when we made our plans up to five years ago.

Why has it become your evaluation/facilitation home? Why did you commit, stay, choose to become a member? What about why we choose to work this way? 

Ultimately, membership at TerraLuna has allowed me to approach my work with confidence. Confidence that our evaluation support will help programmers ultimately see successful outcomes, and that our work will have had something to do with it. Confidence that our client partners will look at our relationship as having been a vital part of their program. And, confidence that we can build their own ability to self-evaluate through the process. This confidence has allowed me to reach for larger, or more complex projects in my work life, which has led to really meaningful work.

Had I and the other members not joined each other on this journey, and instead worked alone from home on a small number of local projects, our work on the projects we had would be less fulfilling to us and less valuable to our partners. Instead, we share a collaborative brain, and a wide variety of lived experiences. We bounce ideas off of each other, and we bring in one another when specific expertise is needed. As a result, we hear great things about how each of our project relationships is progressing and get to enjoy the programming success as our partners make some small part of the globe just a little bit better for some small subset of people.