2024 reflections

It’s that reflective time of year where I look back on the year that’s been and try to summarise what it’s taught me.

2024 has been a weird one! In many respects, it’s been the happiest year of my life. I married the love of my life and we continue to build a life and community I love being a member of. I’ve been there for the happiest moments in my friends’ lives too, as they grow their families and their babies turn into little humans I can have full, weird, conversations with. On the work front, I’ve undertaken some really meaningful work and worked alongside many clients who I deeply value for their skill, commitment and humour. Standouts this year have been working with the team at Flat Out Inc. , launching their Beyond Bricks and Bars evaluation and helping them to win a grant to continue demonstrating the impact of their work. It was a joy to work with Tracy Taylor-Beck and Tara Kelly at Better Health Network on developing a more size inclusive approach to community healthcare, a project that matters so much to me on a deeply personal level. I’ve started exciting projects with Women and Mentoring - WAM Ltd , Respect Victoria , and Switchboard Victoria which I’m looking forward to continuing into the new year and beyond. I've enjoyed working with a range of people through coaching and provision of training - it's always interesting to hear about the different contexts in which people are working through similar challenges.

As ever, I continue to work regularly with an incredible group of freelance evaluators and small evaluation companies who truly are the only way this work is viable! Particular shoutouts to Fran Demetriou , Emma Thomas , Claire Grealy , Lydia Phillips , Martina Donkers , Flick Grey and Morgan Cataldo for their depth of thinking and industry peer support (always risky to name particular individuals - I'm sure I've forgotten someone and will feel guilty about this for ages...). Over the last couple of years, I've worked on some projects where we've recruited and trained up peer evaluators, and these wrapped up this year. I miss my regular conversations with Alison Aquilina , Alycia Deske , Dr Amar Freya , Danny Sun Baulch 孙锡淳 , Nina, Ricki Spencer , and Sharyn Jenkins ! If you are ever looking for some fabulous lived experience researchers, I cannot recommend this group more highly!

I was fortunate enough to be able to take 2 months off in the second half of the year, and to take a more extended leave of absence from my PhD. It was prompted by my wedding, overseas visitors and honeymoon but truth be told, I really needed it, and likely would have taken a similar period off earlier in the year if I hadn’t had that booked period already planned. On a zoom call last week, a fellow evaluator reminded me that I was talking openly about being burnt out in 2023... and I didn't really do anything to address that until this year.

Over the last few years, I’ve worked hard to find, lead and contribute to projects that matter to me, building on my own lived experience of mental ill-health, suicidality and intimate partner violence. It’s been invigorating to work in these areas, to share my experiences, and to work alongside the strength and wisdom of others with lived experience. But it’s not been without cost. I am tired, and in early-mid 2024, it all caught up with me a bit.

We have reached an era of policy development and evaluation that talks about concepts as important, but inadequately resources, values and understands these practices. This results in moral injury, and leaves people with lived experience fighting for the scraps (often between each other). And alongside this, I look at policy innovation in the last decade of my practice and see that little has actually changed in terms of social outcomes. Governments keep investing in the same ineffective solutions, without addressing some of the most serious policy failures of our time (including housing, poverty, climate change, human rights).

As an evaluator, I’ve been reflecting on what all this means for my work into the future. What have I learned?

Despite good intentions, many organisations do not create the cultures to support evaluation to be done well. These are the cultures that lead lived experience researchers, evaluators and consultants to get burnt out and disillusioned. At the moment, I don’t want to be always working from my own lived experience. It’s exhausting. But I want to work with organisations to make it less exhausting for myself and others – to make real and meaningful cultural change in organisations that say they do work led by lived experience.

Policy and program responses are siloed, and the evaluations of these are also narrowly tied to programs that tweak things around the edges. Without addressing the fundamental drivers of inequity, poverty and marginalisation, we are never going to see meaningful improvements in outcomes. The more I work in the health and family violence sectors, the more I see that the fundamental solutions to these challenges exist in addressing our basic human needs – for housing, justice, anti-oppressive practices, community and connection.

Policy and program responses are often not underpinned by lived experience – even when they say they are. And those programs that are really making a difference? They’re community-led, peer-led, genuine alternatives to business as usual. They are shaking things up. The challenge is that these are not always viewed as legitimate program solutions, they lack evidence, and community-led programs often lack the resources to build the evidence. Peer evidence, including peer practice evidence, is often undervalued.

A constant tension when working as a lived experience evaluator is the tension between sharing and working from those experiences which have fundamentally altered my sense of self and the world, but a common expectation that research and evaluation are ‘objective’. At the same time, many organisations are actively seeking evaluation that helps them tell a human story, but don’t know how to do it in a way that is methodologically sound and helps them in their advocacy. Lived experience-led evaluation can’t, and shouldn’t, try to flatten the lived experience. Organisations should embrace that evaluation, when done well, is a tool of advocacy. It leads to program improvement. Evaluation reports are about lessons learned, not just the paper they produce.

So what does this mean for 2025?

I’m moving away from focusing my energy on projects in the mental health and family violence sectors that need me to bring so much of my personal lived experience. What I have is an understanding of how you do these projects well, and I want to help other organisations build the infrastructure to do that work. My passion for social justice is deeply driven by my lived experience but it means I am thinking more holistically about how to use that lived experience to make meaningful change in the world.?

I want to work with organisations that are addressing these fundamental drivers of social justice, and are committed to meaningfully moving the dial and demonstrating their impact. I’m excited to keep using my time flexibly to continue contributing to organisations I’m passionate about (as a board member with Eating Disorders Victoria and Juno ).

I’m looking forward to continuing to develop a research interest in the areas of research ethics and trauma-informed practice, applying that theoretically in my PhD and practically in my role on the DH/DFFH HREC.

And I’m trying to find ways to balance out my life a bit more. To avoid working myself into the ground and trying different ways to engage my brain. I’ve got really into gardening (working on the ground, not into the ground), and for something completely different, I’m now available as a vegan caterer and I’m hoping to launch a premade meal service in 2025 (follow my terrible food photos on IG @pinkmagnoliavegan).

As a consultant for five years, and an evaluator for ten, my practice so far has been to WORK and WORK and WORK. But 2024 has taught me the value of a rounded life, and that there are so many ways I can use my skills – evaluation and not – to help create the kind of community that is safe, loving and that I want to live in.