Fifteen years in social work and evaluation.

Background and current work

I am Joshua Bauer, a social worker and researcher with a Master of Social Work. Roughly fifteen years of that has been in child welfare and health systems, some of it close to the front line and some of it in the rooms where the front line gets designed.

I am a Senior Planning, Programming and Research Officer at the Cree Board of Health and Social Services of James Bay, in Eeyou Istchee, Quebec. The work is evaluation, implementation and change adoption; it comes down to the unglamorous question of whether a good idea survived contact with a real service.

My stance is dignity-first and non-deficit. Gaps belong to systems, services and designs; they do not belong to the populations those services were built for. That is not a slogan. It changes which variables get collected, how a finding is worded, and which explanations are allowed to stand.

Areas of practice

These are the disciplines I work in, described as they actually operate rather than as a list of headings.

Program evaluation

Indicator sets and mixed-method designs built to answer a question someone actually has. Developmental where a service is still forming; summative only when a service is stable enough to be judged fairly.

Implementation science

The distance between a design on paper and the version a team can run on a Tuesday. Fidelity, adaptation and the conditions a service needs before it can hold a change.

Readiness and change adoption

Whether a team, a policy and a data system can carry a change before it is launched. ADKAR is the framework I work from, with the awareness and desire stages taken as seriously as the training plan.

Knowledge translation

Findings turned into something a manager or a front-line worker can use. Short briefs, plain tables and dashboards that admit their own limits.

Logic models and theory of change

Making the causal claim explicit, so that a program states what it expects to change and by what mechanism, and so an evaluation has something to test.

Results-based management

Objectives, indicators and reporting joined into one chain, so that measurement serves the decisions in front of a service rather than the reporting calendar behind it.

Curriculum vitae

Experience

Education

The full curriculum vitae, with earlier roles, publications, certifications and the methods behind them.

Contact

Messages reach me through this form.