ARTD Consultants

In April 2021, one in five Australians faced financial distress, struggling to cover essential costs. Financial counselling has become an important resource, providing free, independent support to help people navigate these financial challenges and mitigate further negative impacts.   We are grateful to get to work in this sector, from working to understand the unmet demand for financial counselling services in Australia, to evaluating how well financial counselling works within different settings, such as tenancy organisations.    Our recent examples in this sector can be found on our website.

Several members from our #disasterresilience and #environment focussed consulting team attended the recent Australian Disaster Resilience Conference in Sydney. Key takeaways we're reflecting on for our work are: minimise the burden of data collection for first responders; resilience moves at the speed of trust; resilience is a unique journey. Read our reflections on these in this blog by Ellen Wong. https://lnkd.in/gRJhqGbY

Kate Sunners, Manager at ARTD, is currently at the Advancing Equity Co-Lab conference, hosted by CCQ PHN with speakers and delegates who are working to create more equitable systems across many different issue areas and challenges. She has reflected on some of her early takeaways.   • There is an amount of sheer relentlessness and personal resilience needed to keep at the work of systems change, and at the same time it requires an enormous amount of flexibility and responsiveness. • It is possible and important to create spaces of collaboration in spite of the competition that very often exists outside of those spaces (i.e. funding). • The difficulties of commissioning and funding systems change work in a system that slices and dices by issue area is widely felt, by both people working in procurement as well as by those doing the doing. Much of systems change work is learning and development work, and much is iterative as it responds to shifts in the system and accounts for local context. This makes it difficult to fund when the mechanisms in place are set up to fund programmatic work. Place based work is a somewhat easier scale to fund, but the challenge of this is that at some point there's a question about how to scale that up to the level of universal services. • We know how to launch our initiatives, but not when and how they will land, and with what results. We often don't control their cadence. We need decision making frameworks to support us to take actions to destabilise systems that aren't working the way we need them to and then observe the changes, orient, decide and act. • When we use a reductive approach to data (for example looking at data from within artificial geographic boundaries or issue area silos) this can lead to linear explanations of complex problems. This can mean we can have evidence based interventions but that the evidence they are based on are not grounded in reality, which can and does lead to program failure.   Kate is looking forward to another day ahead! *Image: Ingrid Burkett, Director of the Griffith Centre For Social Change, in front of an infographic depicting systems levers.

If you've been reading ARTD's posts for a while, you may have already heard about our Chief Evaluator Andrew Hawkins' Propositional Evaluation approach. In this article (EJA online early access), Andrew and collaborator Scott Bayley take a deep dive into Propositional Evaluation. Propositional Evaluation "emphasises the creation of ‘sound’ programs through logical validity and empirical grounding, moving away from theory testing towards identifying risks in program design and managing the uncertainties of program implementation. This mindset fosters a collaborative, reasoned evaluation process that embraces multiple realities and perspectives. It champions pragmatism and reasoned action within complex systems". There's much to consider in this article, from the theoretical underpinnings of the approach (an enjoyable romp for those who take delight in philosophy, science and causality, and evaluation theories), to the common symptoms of and underlying causes of failure, and ten risks which may be managed using a Propositional Evaluation approach, along with illustrative examples. The article also provides a two-step framework to manage the risk of program failure, with a focus in the design phase on determining the logical validity of a program, and in the delivery phase by collecting empirical data. Essentially, asking the questions "what makes this a good idea?” and "how can we make this work?". This article is the result of many years of deep thinking, wide reading and discussions with other evaluators. It may just change the way you think about what evaluation is, forever! Read the article at: https://lnkd.in/gaRCW4ur More of Andrew's thinking on the topic can be found at: https://lnkd.in/g5wcS7xN 

Meet Maïa G. in our latest 'Meet Our People' profile. Maia is a Analyst who enjoys the variability of what a day in her role looks like. Read more about Maia here: https://lnkd.in/gvu7RFdV

We have a few new case studies up on our website (our case study area has also had a facelift, making it easier to find examples relevant to your sector). In our Environment section, you’ll find new case studies on the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy MERI framework, Process and Outcome Evaluation of the Improved Energy Efficiency Standards Program, as well as the Evaluation of the Northern Australia Biosecurity Strategy https://lnkd.in/g5-hXSNA

We have four new staff who have joined ARTD Consultants over the past few weeks across several of our teams. Welcome to our new team members, Sophie Henness, Layal Hanna, Dr. Patricia Rose and Tracee Kresin! We look forward to working with you all.  

Last week several ARTD staff both presented and attended the 2024 AES Conference in Melbourne. Tuli Keidar has written an insightful blog that takes the novel approach of collecting our staff's key insights from the conference and collates them into a thematic analysis that explores different evaluation tools, comparing research methods, how stakeholders value impacts, and how conference participation strengthens bonds across the field. You can have a read of Tuli's blog here: https://lnkd.in/g_A7AHjR

ARTD led the evaluation of the 'Standing Tall' program for NeuRA (Neuroscience Research Australia). 'Standing Tall' is a home-based, technology-delivered exercise program designed to reduce the risk of falls in older adults. You can read more about 'Standing Tall' and the results of the study here: https://lnkd.in/gEjp9dgn

We have capped off the week celebrating Andrew Hawkins, who was awarded the Evaluation System Award with the Australian Border Force and Jade Maloney for being reelected onto the AES Board. Congratulations both for these great achievements! As #aes24mel draws to close, we would like to share some final reflections from Senior Consultant Sally Evans.   The last day of the conference did not disappoint with opportunities to attend a number of interesting sessions. The morning started with reflections on ensuring we are talking to the right stakeholders throughout our work. Julian King and Adrian Field delivered a thought-provoking interactive session on value proposition and rubrics. It caused me to consider how different outcomes are valued by different stakeholders to varying degrees.   My colleagues at ARTD also delivered two sessions today, reflecting on the ways we interact with stakeholders. Sharon Marra-Brown and Mitch spoke about ways of engaging children and young people to ensure we elevate their voices. Ellen and Jade also delivered an insightful session with independent evaluator Martina Donkers on the use of participatory analysis workshops.   In the afternoon, we heard from a panel featuring Lucy Macmillan, Dr Tessa Boyd-Craine, Micaela Cronin and Tiffiny Lewin. They also highlighted the importance of elevating the voices of those impacted and the importance of lived experience.   This conference has provided so many opportunities for connecting, learning and reflecting. I am leaving with a sense of gratitude for the work we do and the people we work with.   As the ARTD team bids farewell to this year's conference, we'd love to share some visual highlights. Check out our photo carousel below for a glimpse into our week!