Greta James

I'm Greta James — a researcher and monitoring and evaluation consultant based in Southern Ontario. I've spent the last several years applying that research background to helping social service organizations use data and empirical research to make better decisions and grow their impact. But I never expected to end up here.

I have always consumed ideas like candy — I devoured anthropology and psychology, cognitive science and biology in my undergraduate before completing a PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Waterloo in 2018, where I specialized in judgment and decision-making. Then an unexpected thing happened: a short-term contract helping a local family shelter evaluate and redesign their programming showed me that I didn't just want to study how things work — I wanted to turn that knowledge into action. That contract turned into five years of frontline work evaluating programs and eventually into co-founding Measurement 4 Change. In that time, I've learned that very little of what researchers know about social change makes it to the front line — and very few of the questions on the front line make it back to researchers. Closing that gap is what this work is for.

Social problems are complex and difficult — but we give social service organizations almost no resources to experiment, innovate, or adapt. We expect them to deploy perfectly effective programming and make accurate decisions without the funding or support to probe the critical questions that inform their work. And we don't culturally accept failure or risk-taking — we certainly don't fund it.