All our projects are unique but our work on them usually starts in the same way. We build evaluation partnerships, collaboration, confidence, and rapport with the organisations we are working for, their service users, and beneficiaries. Between us we create a living stream of knowledge from shaping the past, understanding the present, and planning for the future. 

I started at the Institute in 2015 to join others already here in working with the theory-based evaluation of complex projects. I was lucky to work with, and learn a lot from, the Tavistock’s evaluation guru, Dione Hills, who sadly died in 2021. In this job I have worked on the evaluation of projects about the environment and de-carbonisation, health navigation, trains, culture, resilience, personal finances, food standards, parental alcohol dependence, and well-being, to name a few. Some large scale with central government, others small scale with voluntary organisations. 

Before coming here my career stretched from early years in a law centre and work with drug users through to later years that included: work on crime and policing with a London borough; managing a project resettling adults with learning disabilities in the community; running a UK government grants programme for parent support services; business planning and quality management as a consultant and in-house at Barnardos. All this work was united by a strong interest in the construction of positive change and what we can learn from it.