It Depends

In this episode, Matt speaks with Tanya Rong — Chair of the Latrobe Health Assembly, Australia's first community-led health assembly, and a PhD candidate at Monash University researching place-based approaches to health and wellbeing. Drawing on more than a decade leading the Assembly — born out of the Hazelwood mine fire and recently reborn as a community-owned charity after being defunded — Tanya unpacks what makes work genuinely place-based: honouring local knowledge, building trust before delivery, and getting the ‘preparation’ right so that participation and impact can follow. It's a candid, hopeful conversation about the social determinants of health, sharing power with community, the realities of short-term funding, and why she'd rather invest in prevention than build bigger hospitals. It makes a natural companion to our earlier episode, Governance not Geography with Luke Craven — whose national place-based network, PLACE, Tanya points to as a go-to in the field.

In this episode, Matt speaks with Michael Hogan, Executive Convenor of the Queensland Kids Partnership — an initiative hosted by ARACY that works to improve the wellbeing of Queensland's children and young people. Michael shares why the partnership deliberately set out not to add another organisation to a crowded ecosystem, choosing instead to convene, catalyse and connect the people and programs already doing the work. It's a wide-ranging conversation about systems change, place-based practice, the role of philanthropy, and the shift from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage.

In this episode, Matt speaks with Christabelle Darcy and Alison Reedy, the co-convenors of the 2026 Australian Evaluation Society Conference in Darwin. Under the theme Making Space, Valuing Place, Christabelle and Alison walk us through the four subthemes, the keynote line-up, and what they're most looking forward to when the evaluation community gathers from 14–18 September. It's a thoughtful preview of a conference designed to welcome a broader audience into evaluation conversations — and to honour the context of the Top End.

In this special episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Diana Connell — lived experience advocate and Ambassador for McAuley Community Services for Women and Global Sisters. Diana shares her story of surviving two decades of family violence and walks us through what genuine co-design with lived experience looks like in practice — multiple seats at the table, fair pay, trauma-informed practice, and the willingness to actually change things. It's a generous and urgent conversation about dignity, the interconnection of family violence, housing and economic security, and what it takes to lift the bar so women don't just survive.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with KA McKercher, founder of Beyond Sticky Notes and author of the book of the same name. KA unpacks why good co-design is as much about beauty, choice and relationships as it is about methods — and why, most of the time, communities don't need a brand new project, but rather someone to notice, strengthen and support what's already there. It's a generous conversation about power, preparedness, endings, seasonality, and what it takes to do this work with care.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Jocelyn Bignold, CEO of McAuley Community Services for Women, about the deep intersection between family violence and homelessness in Australia. Jocelyn unpacks why the system still pushes women to leave — and what happens when there's nowhere safe to go. She walks us through the Safe at Home trial in Geelong and Barwon, which is flipping the script by supporting whole families to stay safe, and shares what she's learning about systems change, risk, early intervention, and what it takes to turn curiosity into action.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Professor Michael Flood from Queensland University of Technology — one of Australia's leading researchers on men, masculinities, and violence prevention. Michael unpacks what it takes to genuinely engage men and boys in preventing domestic and sexual violence, from what works in face-to-face education to why building communities of support matters as much as the programs themselves. It's a nuanced and hopeful conversation about language, the limits of "toxic masculinity" as a frame, what the Man Box research tells us, and what it means to do this work well.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Heidi Peterson, Lead Principal Consultant at Clear Horizon Consulting and author of a new framework for assessing the value for money of systems change efforts. Heidi walks us through five types of value creation — from inherent and potential value through to transformative change — and makes the case for expanding how we understand, evidence, and deliberate on value. It's a rich conversation about what happens when complexity meets the demand for efficiency, and why evaluators should resist making peace with the tension.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with John Hitchin, co-founder of Stories of Change and co-author of the Place and Evidence in the UK report. John unpacks what genuinely makes work place-based versus just happening in a place, and walks us through a new taxonomy of five categories of place-based change — each driven by different mechanisms and requiring different forms of evidence. It's a rich conversation about aligning evidence to how change actually happens, the role of relationships, and what it takes to build a field of practice.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Jessie Robinson, a proud Wiradjuri man and founder of Mawang Consulting, about what it truly means to do co-design well. Jessie shares insights on why co-design is fundamentally about power redistribution, not process, and how First Nations ways of being and doing can guide us toward more relational, community-led change. He challenges us to move beyond performative engagement and consider when stepping back might be more powerful than stepping in.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille speak with Dr Luke Craven, CEO of PLACE Australia (Partnerships for Local Action and Community Empowerment), about what it really means to take a place-based approach. Luke shares insights from engaging with 53 initiatives nationally, revealing that effective place-based work is fundamentally about governance, not geography. He outlines the three principles of subsidiarity, accountability, and partnership that underpin meaningful practice, and explains why being tight on purpose but loose on the how might be the key to lasting systems change.

In this episode, Matt speaks with historian and social researcher Dr Gretel Evans about the powerful intersections between storytelling, place, and community resilience. Drawing on her work with the Fire to Flourish program at Monash University, Gretel shares insights from the upcoming Community Disaster Resilience Capability Framework and reveals why unexpected things, like a commercial dishwasher, can tell us more about resilience than surveys ever could.

What does it mean to be an evaluator, and how do we think about our professional identity in a rapidly changing field? In this episode, Dr Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead helps us look beneath the surface of evaluation practice. We explore the classic fox and hedgehog metaphor and what it reveals about how evaluators operate, why our tendencies matter, and how artificial intelligence is reshaping the judgments we make and the competencies we need.

What happens when we stop treating suicide prevention as an individual issue and start seeing it as a system? In this episode, Dr Maria Michail shares her pioneering work bridging psychology, systems science, and participatory research. Together we explore what it means to move "from authority to authenticity" and why young people's voices are essential to meaningful research in this space.

We throw the word co-design around a lot, but what does that little "co" really mean? In this episode, Emma Blomkamp helps us unpack the language, myths, and maturity of co-design, exploring when it works, when it doesn't, and how systems thinking intersects with design practice. Drawing on years of experience in social innovation, facilitation, and capability building, Emma reminds us that it all comes back to one thing: purpose.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille chat with Todd Miller about why traditional command-and-control structures only tell part of the story in emergency management. Todd shares his Complex Adaptive Disaster and Emergency Management (CADEM) Framework, exploring how trust, relationships, and recognising emergent actors can transform how communities prepare for and respond to disasters. His advice? Start with something simple, like reaching out for a cup of tea.

In this episode, Matt and Tenille sit down with Associate Professor Emily Gates from Boston College to explore the limits of outcomes-focused evaluation and what it truly means to evaluate systemic change. Together, they unpack the importance of boundaries, perspectives, and stewardship in systems practice, and why evaluators may need to act less like neutral judges and more like facilitators of critical deliberation. Emily invites us to pause, self-critique, and think differently about how evaluation can contribute to meaningful, lasting change.

In this episode, we sit down with internationally recognised evaluator Julian King to explore what it really means to assess value. Moving beyond traditional cost-benefit analysis and social return on investment, Julian introduces his award-winning Value for Investment (VfI) approach. It's an interdisciplinary framework that combines economic rigour with stakeholder perspectives and explicit evaluative reasoning. We also unpack rubrics, participatory evaluation, and Julian's idea of "Cubist evaluation," which emphasises multiple perspectives and collective sense-making in practice.

Scaling impact sounds simple: just do more of what worked. In reality, it's far messier. In this episode, Matt sits down with evaluation pioneer John Gargani to explore the intersections of design, evaluation, and scaling impact. Together they unpack why the "classic" growth model of scaling falls short, why design and evaluation are inseparable, and how context shapes everything when trying to create change at scale.

In this episode, Tenille speaks with Dr. Skye Trudgett, a proud First Nations woman and CEO of Kowa, about putting Indigenous data sovereignty into practice. Skye shares her journey from aspiring sleep scientist to leading national work in evaluation, research, and community-led data governance. This conversation demystifies what Indigenous data sovereignty really means, unpacks common misconceptions, and explores the small but powerful changes that can shift systems.

Join Matt and Tenille for an exclusive behind-the-scenes chat with Kim Grey and Ruth Nicholls, the co-conveners of the 2025 Australian Evaluation Conference in Canberra. Discover what's in store when the evaluation community gathers from 15-19 September under the theme "Beyond the Bubble", exploring the four sub-themes of Foundations, Connecting, Cultivating, and Transforming. Kim and Ruth share their thinking on keynote speakers, sessions they're excited about, and why the magic of evaluation conferences lies in unexpected connections.

In this debut episode of It Depends, Matt Healey and Tenille Moselen are joined by Eleanor Williams, Managing Director of the Australian Centre for Evaluation, for a wide-ranging conversation on constraints, commissioning, and causation in public policy evaluation. Together, they explore what makes evidence fit for purpose, how to build meaningful relationships between evaluators and commissioners, and the everyday ethical dilemmas evaluators face. This episode is essential listening for anyone navigating the tension between rigour, relevance, and real-world constraints.