Tehout Selameab joined the McKnight Foundation in 2023 as senior program officer for learning, and in 2025 became the organization’s second director of learning. In this role, she fosters strategic learning spaces for staff, partners, and the communities McKnight serves, while also helping programs monitor the impact and progress of strategies and share stories about their work with diverse audiences.
Tehout is a strategic research, planning, and evaluation professional with 20 years of experience conceptualizing, managing, and evaluating community-based programs. Prior to McKnight, she was the founder and CEO of arcadia research & evaluation, where she led a team of women and women of color evaluators, facilitators, and community liaisons with a passion for community-based health equity efforts. She worked with clients across philanthropy, government, academia, and community organizations on project planning and evaluation, designing and delivering communities of practice, and co-creating conceptual frameworks and metrics. Before that she held research and planning positions with Education Development Center, Ramsey County, and Hennepin County.
Tehout holds a PhD in evaluation studies, a master of public policy, and a bachelor’s of science in applied economics from the University of Minnesota. She lives in Saint Paul with her family, and in her free time likes to lay in her hammock in the summer and curl up with a book in the winter.
Favorite quote: “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
