Hallie Preskill

Managing Director, FSG’s Strategic Evaluation

Hallie Preskill, PhD, is a Managing Director with FSG, a nonprofit strategy, evaluation, and research firm. In her role, she oversees the firm’s Strategic Learning & Evaluation practice and advises on a wide variety of evaluation and learning projects with foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and government organizations.

A leading thinker on the intersection of evaluation, learning and change, Hallie will help us shape our conversation and stimulate dialogue – Evaluation Across Boundaries.

“The time couldn’t be better for a conference devoted to Evaluation Across Boundaries. For evaluation to remain relevant, credible, and useful, it will have to adapt and change to new and emerging contexts and environments. This means that evaluators will need to think out of the box – we will need to expand our understandings and practices in ways that challenge conventional boundaries and the status quo. I am excited about what promises to be a thought provoking, stimulating, and boundary pushing event!”

Prior to joining FSG, Hallie spent more than 20 years in academia, teaching graduate level courses in program evaluation, training design and development, organizational learning, appreciative inquiry and consulting. Her research has focused on evaluation capacity building, transfer of learning/training, evaluation use, and evaluation as a catalyst for individual, team, and organizational learning. Hallie’s books include Becoming the Change (2011), Reframing Evaluation through Appreciative Inquiry (2006), Building Evaluation Capacity: 72 Activities for Teaching and Training (2005), Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting (1999, 2005), and Evaluation in Organizations: A Systematic Approach to Enhancing Learning, Performance & Change (2001, 2009).

Dr. Preskill was the 2007 President of the American Evaluation Association. She received the American Evaluation Association’s Alva and Gunnar Myrdal Award for Outstanding Professional Practice in 2002 and the University of Illinois Distinguished Alumni Award in 2004. Over the years, she has provided workshops on various evaluation and training related workshops, and has conducted evaluations the areas of education, economic development, public and mental health, media and information, the environment, poverty, and global development. Hallie holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

George Roter

CEO and Co-Founder, Engineers Without Borders Canada

“We have a huge opportunity for us to start thinking about evaluation as completely integrated with learning, with discovery, and with iteration,” says George Roter. “If we do this, evaluation will not just be an exercise in accountability and report writing, but will truly unlock the potential of practitioners to deliver great work, and the potential of projects to be truly transformative.”

What does it mean to be the CEO of a movement? For George Roter, it meant dropping out of his Master’s program and running up $30,000 in credit card debt to fund the launch of Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) – that turned out to be a good decision. As EWB’s co-founders, George and friend/colleague Parker Mitchell stewarded the organization from an idea scribbled on a napkin to global influence with 3,000 active volunteers, 50,000 supporters, 35 chapters in Canada and teams in Malawi, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Zambia.

In 2010, Parker left to seek new challenges, and George is now the sole CEO of an organization with volunteers and staff that have been embedded in more than 150 African businesses, governments and organizations. They drive EWB’s teams, working to help local leaders and entrepreneurs create bottom-up and disruptive innovations that address systemic issues – in agriculture and rural infrastructure. Through this work, EWB is impacting the lives of more than 2.5 million people in Africa.

EWB is also a ‘torch’ for engineers and social change in Canada. George and Parker believed that the engineering profession had a greater role to play in society, and that EWB could lead a movement of socially-minded engineers. EWB’s Canadian teams include Canada’s largest grassroots advocacy network on international issues, and partnerships to change undergraduate curriculum for 20,000 students, transforming them into Global Engineers.

George’s continued work has ensured EWB’s ‘torch’ inspires change beyond the organization’s borders. Past and present EWBers have launched one of the world’s largest ethical shopping websites. They’re starting social businesses, like Mobile Transactions Zambia, which enables the movement of money using mobile phones. Or Rent-to-Own, which leases farmers the productive equipment they need to grow their businesses. They’re launching import and export businesses that open new markets for African goods. All of these lead to prosperity for rural Africans.

Through EWB, George inspires an ever-growing network of leaders who are dedicated to making disruptive, positive change. He has been recognized as an Ashoka Fellow for Social Entrepreneurship (2012), was awarded the Young Leaders Award by the Public Policy Forum (2007), named as one of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 (2005) and awarded an Action Canada Fellowship (2004) on public policy. He was also recognized by Time magazine as one of Canada’s next generation of social leaders (2001).

George holds a Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo (1999), a Bachelor of Applied Studies (Honorary) from Seneca College (2009) and a Doctorate of Applied Science (Honorary) from Queen’s University. When he’s not out trying to change the world, he’s relaxing at home or canoeing with his wife Sari and his golden retriever Coel. And he still doesn’t have his Master’s.

Sanjeev Sridharan

Director, Evaluation Centre for Complex Health Interventions

Sanjeev Sridharan is Director of the Evaluation Centre for Complex Health Interventions at Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michaels Hospital and Associate Professor at the Department of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto. Prior to his position at Toronto, he was the Head of the Evaluation Program and Senior Research Fellow at the Research Unit in Health, Behaviour and Change at the University of Edinburgh. He is a former associate editor of the American Journal of Evaluation and is on the boards of the Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation and the Journal of Evaluation and Evaluation and Program Planning.

John Gargani

President and Founder of Gargani + Company, Inc.

John Gargani is the President and Founder of Gargani + Company, Inc., a program design and evaluation firm located in Berkeley, California. Over the past 20 years, he has designed innovative social programs and educational curricula; directed large randomized trials of educational reforms; developed new reading, writing, science, and math assessments; and created novel technologies that measure how people think. His work has taken him to diverse settings, including public housing projects, museums, countries adopting free market economies, and 19th century sailing ships. He shares his knowledge of program design and evaluation at EvalBlog.com, published articles, workshops, and speaking engagements. He holds a Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley, where he studied measurement and evaluation; an M.S. in Statistics from New York University’s Stern School of Business; and an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.

“It is an exciting time in evaluation. The boundaries of the profession are expanding and our work is becoming increasingly important to policymakers, program designers, and philanthropists. The challenge we face over next few years is growing our profession in ways that maximize our contribution to the greater good. I am thrilled to be a part of 2013 CES conference where we—as a community—will have a chance to do just that by sharing our visions of the future and advancing the benefits of evaluation.”