Pieter de Vos

Facilitator

Pieter de Vos is a facilitator, documentary photographer, and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Evaluation Capacity Network. Prior to joining ECN, he facilitated over 400 projects with community-based and public sector organizations of varying sizes and complexities in Canada and abroad. His assignments ranged from leading strategic planning and change management sessions with executive teams throughout the provincial government; to stewarding human-centred design labs to prototype social innovations; to leading large-scale public participation processes on topics such as patient engagement, the opioid epidemic, suicide prevention, inclusion for LGBTQ+ communities, and affordable housing and homelessness. Pieter has a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Alberta as well as a MSc in Public Health. His previous research focused on using narrative and visual methods to explore community understandings of home and belonging in an informal settlement in South Africa. Over the past several years, Pieter has enriched his practice by using participatory photography, digital storytelling, and arts-based methods to enhance dialogue and deliberation. He has facilitated workshops using these methods in Kenya, Sweden, Tanzania, Pakistan, Haiti, and the USA. Outputs from these projects can be found at: http://www.pieterdevos.ca

Emma Wallace

Facilitator

Emma works as a Program Specialist at the Edmonton Chamber of Voluntary Organizations. In this role, she develops and coordinates capacity building programming for the non-profit sector and conducts research and evaluation projects related to sector transformation. Past roles have seen Emma working as a researcher, evaluator, community development and engagement specialist, and as a facilitator. She has a Masters in Community Engagement from the University of Alberta where she dedicated her studies to exploring and advocating for the inclusion of people experiencing poverty in anti-poverty initiatives. Emma is committed to employing community-based, participatory approaches in her work, and aims to ensure an equity lens is also at the forefront of everything she does.

Mark Cabaj

Mark is President of the consulting company From Here to There and an Associate of Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement. While studying the Solidarity movement in Krakow, Poland, in mid-1989, Mark experienced a variety of tumultuous events that signalled the end of communism in Eastern Europe – including walking on the Berlin Wall with a million people the week it came down in November 1989. He then rolled up sleeves and worked as an Investment Advisor in Poland’s Foreign Investment Agency, the Foreign Assistance Coordinator for Grants in the new Ministry of Privatization, and the Mission Coordinator for the creation of the United Nations Development Program’s first regional economic development initiative in Eastern Europe. Back in Canada, Mark was the Coordinator of the Waterloo Region’s Opportunities 2000 project (1997-2000), an initiative that won provincial, national and international awards for its multi-sector approach to poverty reduction. He served briefly as the Executive Director of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) (2001) and was Vice President of the Tamarack Institute and the Executive Director of Vibrant Communities Canada (2002-2011). Mark’s current focus is on developing practical ways to understand, plan and evaluate efforts to address complex issues. This includes challenges such as neighborhood renewal, poverty and homelessness, community safety, educational achievement and health. He is particularly involved in developing and promoting developmental evaluation, a new approach to assessment which emphasizes real time feedback and learning in emerging, messy and sometimes fast-moving environments. Mark lives in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) with his wife Leann and their children Isaiah and Zoë. http://here2there.ca/

Bethan Kingsley

Bethan Kingsley is an evaluation skeptic who believes that while evaluation can support learning practices if it is done with intention and care, most evaluation does not achieve this potential. Her involvement in the Eval Lab is part of a larger ‘experiment’ to move away from taken-for-granted and potentially harmful evaluation practices in the social sector and find new ways that evaluation can play a supportive role. She does this through her experiences as a consultant with In Situ Change Strategies and as a research associate with the Community-University Partnership (CUP) for the Study of Children, Youth and Families at the University of Alberta, using community-based, qualitative research and evaluation approaches to understand various social phenomena.

Sami Berger

Sami works with organizations and initiatives that are striving to create positive change in their communities and are thinking critically about their strategy. Her practice focuses on working with her clients to understand their biggest strategic challenges and the opportunities to address them. As an evaluator, she is passionate about supporting learning that helps us question our assumptions and guide the ways that we decide to think, care, and act. She also works with networks to build processes to support governance, communications, engagement, and evaluation. Sami uses qualitative methods, including interviews, surveying, social network analysis, and focus groups, to generate findings that can be used strategically. She has a Master’s degree in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. She is originally from Montreal and currently lives in New York City. https://www.curiouscompass.org