Meet the Team
Donna Buxton
ChEW Founder & Trustee
Donna is the joint Head of Impact and Learning at City Bridge Trust, co-leading the Impact and Learning team. Donna’s role is to work across all teams and in London’s civil society to enable the Trust to use evidence and learning strategically and flexibly to achieve its aims.
Before joining CBT Donna was Head of Research at the International Longevity Centre (ILC) which is a specialist think tank on the impact of people living longer and what happens next. Prior to ILC Donna was the Head of Impact, Evaluation and Research at Mencap where her team provided an in-house research and evaluation consultancy service for all staff. Before Mencap, Donna was a Research Manager at the Health Foundation where she led a wide and diverse portfolio of research studies and evaluations from design to delivery, particularly within the fields of scaling-up innovation, patient safety and quality improvement. Prior to the Health Foundation Donna was Impact and Evaluation Lead at British Heart Foundation (BHF) where Donna established BHF's first ‘evaluation office'. Donna has also worked at a Regional Development Agency, the Law Society and the Children's Society in social policy, evaluation and research related roles.
DAVE SALISBURY
ChEW Co-chair & Trustee
Dave first became involved with ChEW back in 2012 when working as an evaluator at Macmillan Cancer Support. He valued the opportunity to meet colleagues facing similar challenges in other organisations, learn from their work and share what he had found useful. He led on work to conduct a suppliers fayre, bringing together recommended suppliers and ChEW members in order to build awareness and contacts of professionals working throughout the sector.
Dave is passionate about the use of evidence in driving decisions that make a positive difference. Having grown Macmillan’s evaluation team, Dave followed this passion, moving on to establish a new team within Macmillan focused on the use of evidence. After taking a year’s sabbatical in which he worked as an independent evaluation consultant in Canada,
Dave returned to the UK to focus on evaluation. Dave now works as an independent evaluator in the UK, has been a member of ChEW’s board since March 2020 and was recently appointed as ChEW Co-chair in 2o22.
JAMI DIXON
ChEW Co-chair & Trustee
After presenting at a ChEW event, Jami joined the ChEW board in 2016. During this time Jami has been heavily involved with designing and delivering ChEW events, where she’s been focused on including diverse topics and diverse voices. Jami is excited to be leading ChEW’s partnership work aimed at creating a movement around equitable evaluation in UK.
Jami started her evaluation career working in international development, involved in the monitoring and evaluation of UK-aid funded projects in sub-Saharan Africa. More recently she was Head of Research, Impact & Learning at UnLtd - The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs and in a previous life completed a PhD exploring climate change and agriculture in Uganda.
Jami is now a freelance social impact consultant, working with charities and social enterprises to improve their impact practice.
In her spare time, Jami can be found curled up reading a book or setting the world to rights over coffee (or maybe wine).
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STEPHEN MILLER
ChEW Trustee
VINAL KARANIA
ChEW Trustee
Vinal first became involved with ChEW in 2013 after joining the charity sector following a decade in the civil service as an economist and policy professional. He valued the opportunity to talk with and learn from evaluation professionals in the charity sector about service evaluation, having previously been involved in policy development and evaluation.
Having built awareness and knowledge of evaluation with colleagues at Age UK, including through carrying out and commissioning evaluations, Vinal is now a Research Manager working on analysis to influence policy. His passion for the importance of evaluation to help improve the delivery and impact of services means he continues to offer advice and support to colleagues about monitoring and evaluation.
Vinal began helping with ChEW in 2016 and has been a member of the board since ChEW was registered as a charity.
CHARLOTTE FIELDER
ChEW Trustee
Charlotte has a varied career undertaking monitoring, evaluation and research for programmes supporting children and young people in the UK.
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Charlotte first developed her interest in the unique opportunities and challenges that charity evaluators face whilst working at The Prince’s Trust. For a long period, she grew and led a large Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) team and function at The Trust, establishing new approaches in the design and implementation of M&E across the organisation. It was at this time she first became involved in ChEW, joining the initial meetings of fellow evaluators sharing experience and together making sense of an emerging and evolving area of practice. She sees ChEW as a vital community of practice for charity evaluators at all stages of their career. She joined ChEW as a trustee in 2020.
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Charlotte is currently the joint research & evaluation lead at the UK committee for Unicef, where she is further developing their evidence base for UK child rights change programming. Prior to this, Charlotte managed evaluations at BBC Children in Need, a significant grant maker for the UK children’s charity sector. Charlotte started her career as a research consultant at Matrix Research & Consultancy and the National Children’s Bureau.
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Charlotte believes strongly in the importance of research and evaluation in enabling children and young people, and other groups of service users, to have a voice in policies and interventions affecting them. She is passionate about evaluation practice that enables learning to support programme practice and policy development, informs decision-making and enables charities to better understand their social impact.
Stephen has been a ChEW member since 2012 and was appointed its first Chair when the network formally incorporated as a Charity in 2019. He has always valued the insight and knowledge exchange ChEW offers, as well as the opportunity to connect with and learn from his peers in evaluation.
Stephen has fifteen years of experience in putting insight into action, working with others to design new products and services, evaluate their impact and tell stories through data. He also has a passion for developing the discipline of evaluation as well as supporting other practitioners, which is one of the many benefits of being involved with ChEW.
Still a Trustee of ChEW, he is also Director of Impact and Learning at Power to Change.