After 5 years, Stephen has stepped down as the Chair of ChEW. Stephen transformed ChEW from an informal network into an incorporated organisation. Stephen was instrumental in ChEW’s receipt of grant funding from the National Lottery Community Fund and has helped to build CHEW’s credibility, establishing open working with relationships with UKES, Coalition for Efficiency and others.
During his tenure as Chair we have launched a new website, delivered many events, introduced a new series of bitesize events and grown our membership, with a specific increase in the number of small charity members. We thank Stephen for his dedicated work with ChEW and all he has done. The good news is that Stephen is continuing to be a trustee.
So, who are our new Co-chairs?
We are thrilled to announce that we have two new Co-chairs, Dave Salisbury and Jami Dixon.
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 and to focus on evaluation. Dave now works as an independent evaluator in the UK and has been a member of ChEW’s board since March 2020.
After presenting at a ChEW event, Jami joined our board in 2016. During this time Jami has been heavily involved with designing and delivering our 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 the 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).
What are our new Co-chairs' priorities?
Dave, Jami and all of the ChEW board are keen to build on the solid foundations laid by Stephen over recent years. We believe that much of the value of ChEW is the mutual support and network built throughout a community of evaluators.
Specifically, we are committed to:
ensuring that our topics of discussion are meaningful and relevant to the needs of our members and help them to meet the key challenges they face in their day to day work
putting our members at the heart of what we do, maximising the value that our members get from us and ensuring we continue to offer opportunities for members to build networks and learn from one another.
hearing from our members at our events about the great work that they do, the challenges they have faced and what they’ve learned along the way
ensuring our quarterly events and other activities continue to enable our members to connect with one another and facilitate peer learning
making ChEW a force for positive change in the charity sector. Over the past year, we have increased our focus on equitable evaluation and this will continue to be a key focus for us in the future. We also want to show leadership in acting as a collective voice for our members and emphasising the importance of evaluation in the sector and its role in ensuring charities are effective and equitable in their impact.
We’ve recently refreshed our mission, vision and values - perhaps you participated in our member consultation on this. We would like to thank every one of you who responded and we will be following up soon with upcoming communication on our strategic direction.