About Us

CRC is an evaluation consultancy for heritage, culture and third sector organisations. We believe good evaluation starts at the beginning, not the end. That means getting clear on what you're trying to achieve and for whom before delivery starts, then building honest, coherent evidence throughout that genuinely serves the people who need it: your team, your funders, and the communities your work is designed to reach.

We work developmentally, staying close to the project, feeding insight back in real time, and producing findings that are useful rather than merely compliant. We centre participant and community voice not as a box to tick, but as evidence that matters. And we believe that the best evaluation asks uncomfortable questions, then helps you do something with the answers.

Curious Roots was founded by Clare Meakin, a heritage learning, engagement and evaluation practitioner with over a decade of experience working across museums, science centres, community programmes and funded heritage projects.

Clare began her engagement career at the Science Museum before moving into senior engagement roles at National Museums Scotland, where she led major funded public programmes, secured and managed significant programme funding, and critically, sat on the client side of the evaluation relationship. She knows what it feels like to design a project, report to funders, commission an external evaluator, and wish in hindsight that she'd asked different questions earlier.

That experience shapes everything about how Curious Roots Consulting works. Clare brings the same rigour and curiosity to every commission, whether that's a two-hour sprint workshop or an 18-month embedded evaluation, and has particular expertise in working with diverse and hard-to-reach audiences, from year 2 pupils to retired community participants, from vulnerable women in deprived communities to students who stayed through their lunch break because they wanted to keep talking.

Clare is a 2019 Churchill Fellow, having researched international approaches to STEM participation pipelines and gender equity across the United States, Canada, South Korea and Japan. Her Fellowship report, From STEM Seeds to Industry: the UK Aspiration Gap?, with shortly be published on the Churchill Fellowship website. She holds a BSc in Biological Sciences and a Postgraduate Diploma in Organisational Behaviour.

For larger or more complex commissions, Curious Roots works with a small pool of carefully selected associates who share our values and our standards. Our associate network includes specialists in quantitative data analysis and social research, bringing the ability to run rigorous analysis on monitoring datasets and translate numbers into clear, actionable insight alongside our qualitative work.

All associates are chosen for their expertise, their judgment, and their commitment to producing findings that are honest, proportionate and genuinely useful to clients.