The It Depends Podcast with Matt Healey

In this episode, Matt speaks with Christabelle Darcy and Alison Reedy — co-convenors of the 2026 Australian Evaluation Society Conference being held in Darwin from 14–18 September. Christabelle leads the Program Evaluation Unit at the NT Department of Treasury and Finance, and Alison manages evaluation at the NT Department of Housing, Local...

In this special episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Diana Connell - lived experience advocate, ambassador for McAuley Community Services for Women and Global Sisters, and a powerful voice for systems change across family violence, housing and economic security.

Diana shares her story of surviving two decades of family violence, becoming homeless with her two children, and the journey that led her into her advocacy and systems chan...

What if most communities don't actually need a new co-design project — just someone to notice and strengthen what's already there?

KA McKercher is a co-design and co-production facilitator, trainer and professional supervisor, founder of Beyond Sticky Notes, and auth...

Family violence is the leading cause of homelessness in Australia. Everything in the system — community expectations, child protection, housing support payments — pushes women to leave. And yet there's nowhere affordable for them to go. The gap in the middle is homelessness.

In this episode, we speak with Jocelyn Bignold, CEO of McAuley Community Services for Women, about the deep intersection between family violen...

What does it take to engage men and boys in preventing domestic and sexual violence — and what separates the work that actually shifts things from the kind that doesn’t?

Professor Michael Flood is an internationally recognised researcher at Queensland University of Technology and one of Australia’s leading voices on men, masculinities, and violence prevention. With over 30 years of experience spanning research, co...

What does it take to demonstrate value for money in systems change approaches? Where do we start when the work is unpredictable, non-linear, and aimed at shifting mindsets rather than just hitting targets?

Heidi Peterson is Lead Principal Consultant at Clear Horizon and a recent PhD candidate who has spent years wrestling with the "rock and hard place" of complexity versus efficiency. In this conversation, she breaks down why tradi...

What does it take to align place-based approaches with the right kind of evidence — and why does getting that wrong cause so many problems?

John Hitchin is co-founder of Stories of Change and co-author of the Place and Evidence in the UK report. In this conversation,...

Jessie Robinson is a proud Wiradjuri man and founder of Mawang Consulting. In this conversation, he challenges us to think differently about co-design — not as a process or framework, but as a fundamentally relational practice roo...

In this episode of It Depends, Matt and Tenille speak with Dr Luke Craven, CEO of PLACE Australia (Partnerships for Local Action and Community Empowerment), a first-of-its-kind effort to connect, resource, and strengthen place-based initiatives nationally.

Luke shares PLAC...

Can a dishwasher be an indicator of community resilience?

In this episode of It Depends, Matt speaks with historian and social researcher Dr Gretel Evans about the powerful intersections between storytelling, place, disaster, and community resilience. Drawing on her work in oral history, migration, and environmental history, Gretel shares how her research into floods and bushfires led her into large-scale, place-based recovery thro...

We talk a lot about what evaluation is. Methods, models, frameworks, competencies. All the pieces we use to make sense of complex systems. But what about the people doing the work. How do we think, learn, and navigate the field, especially at a time when artificial intelligence is influencing how knowledge is created, interpreted, and judged.

In this episode, Dr Bianca Montrosse Moorhead helps us look beneath the surface of evaluat...

Suicide prevention is one of the most complex challenges in public health - but what happens when we stop treating it as an individual issue and start seeing it as a system?

In this episode of It Depends, Matt and Tenille speak with Dr Maria Michail, Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham, whose pioneering work bridges psychology, systems science, and participatory research.

Together we unpack what it means to move &ld...

We throw the word co-design around a lot. It’s become shorthand for collaboration, participation, even goodwill — a prefix that promises inclusion. But what does that little “co-” really mean? In this episode, we explore the shades of co-design: how far collaboration can go, when it works, when it doesn’t, and how systems thinking and design intersect in practice.

Drawing on years of work at the inters...

In this episode of It Depends, Matt and Tenille sit down with Todd Miller, Associate Director of Resilience at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and creator of the Complex Adaptive Disaster and Emergency Management (CADEM) Framework - a systems-based rethink of how we prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters.

Todd brings a deeply relational take to emergency management. Drawing from years in the Army, firefighting,...

In this episode of The It Depends Podcast, Matt and Tenille sit down with Associate Professor Emily Gates from Boston College. Emily is an evaluator, educator, and systems thinker whose work bridges theory and practice, with a focus on how evaluation can better reflect the realities of large-scale systems change.

Their conversation ranges from the limits of outcomes-focused evaluation to the importance of boundaries, perspectives, ...

And just like that the 2025 Australian Evaluation Society Conference comes to a close! Matt and Tenille quickly debrief on the day, but most importantly we hear some thoughts and reflections from the delegates on what they took from the day - the Conference as a whole!

Also, here is the evaluation report that Jo Farmer completed that Tenille discussed. Shout out to all those clients that publish such great examples for others to le...

Day 2 of the 2025 Australian Evaluation Society Conference is done and dusted! Matt and Tenille debrief on the walk back to their hotel and we hear some thoughts from some of the delegates on what they took from the day.

Also, here is Bobby Maher's paper that Tenille referenced in the episode on defining collective capability

If you haven't listened to Day 1's episode (6.1) make sure to check that out first and then come back!

Than...

Coming to you from Canberra, Matt and Tenille summarise their key takeaways from the first day of the Australian Evaluation Society Conference in Canberra. This is the first of a three-part series covering each day. 

If you haven't been able to make the Conference this is a chance to keep up with the latest thinking - as best we can - or if you are here, it's a chance to get our take on some of the key messages.

Thanks for l...