Featured
Get to Know Our Work
Ms. Dominique Morgan, Omaha community activist and musician, was interviewed by Luke Wegener on April 10, 2018 in Omaha, Nebraska. Morgan shared information about growing up poor in North Omaha as the oldest of 4 children, feeling alienated as a young gay kid, her experiences in group homes as an adolescent, her love of music and performance, her significant romantic relationships, surviving an 8-year incarceration, and rebuilding her life and becoming one of Omaha's most celebrated R&B recording artists and community activists.
Resilience isn't something we are born with. It is something we can be taught and nurtured. Dominique's resilience was nurtured through life experience and has evolved out of necessity (homelessness, incarceration, surviving sexual assault) and he has dedicated himself to work that instills the values of resilience and liberation in his community whether it's youth in the classroom during a sexual health lesson, supporting an incarcerated person with advocacy or supporting the leadership of color in my community.
As a partner, we work with our clients supporting them as they advance their mission. We do this by using evaluation, research, and facilitation to learn. We keep one foot inside and one foot outside of their work.
Welcome to the re-imagine TerraLuna Collaborative Brand.
Our brand has emerged from our core commitments over the past seven years - an unwavering pursuit of social justice and equity, developing a multi-disciplinary team, showing up as our whole selves, and prioritizing creativity.
As TerraLuna has grown and evolved in our work we’ve committed to having our work contribute to something more, something worth working towards, a society that is just and equitable.
My mother has always told me, “It’s not just what you do, but who you work with (and for) that’s important.” She’s right. I’ve learned that I’m at my best when I’m able to do work I find meaningful and useful while working with people I respect and trust.
I grew up curious about the multiple narratives that informed and gave life to my identity. The result was a professional pursuit to make sense of how mine and others lives are informed, shaped, and changed by the larger narratives and our responses to them that allow us to live meaningful and worthwhile lives.
I decided to make TerraLuna my professional home because of its core value of social justice and equity, and the members of the cooperative. Our commitment to social justice and equity shapes the work we do and don’t do, the organizations we partner with, and our approach to the work. Being part of a values-forward cooperative was and continues to be of great importance to me.
I have always described my ideal career as a professional student. As a graduate student at Michigan I learned to blend the complexity of the real world with methodology and structure. I learned that both rigor and heart resulted in the best kind of outcome - change.
Like many good things in life, chance and serendipity were what initially brought me into TerraLuna Collaborative. In 2012, I was bike commuting home from the University of Minnesota. I had just started a PhD program in evaluation studies and I was eager to get home to make dinner for my spouse and walk my dog.
I had been a journalist for fifteen years. I love the work, but was interested in taking my toolbox to a different kind of job -- to acquire new tools and to see how compatible my skills might be in a different context. I was also looking to do meaning-making in new ways.
Over the past decade, I've been incredibly fortunate to work with several community-based organizations and foundations narrowly focused on addressing socio-economic disparities in the communities in which I've lived. I became enmeshed in the unique challenges facing these institutions.
I was lucky to meet incredible people through a graduate school internship in evaluation. As I was graduating and beginning a position in early childhood education research, one of the internship colleagues reached out to me about starting an evaluation firm. It felt so outside of my comfort zone that I entered into those conversations very tentatively but am happy that I did.
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.