Receiving the 2006 National Evaluation Development Award, Dr Jessica Dart is a recognized leader in evaluation with over 15 years of involvement in evaluating social change programs in Australia and overseas. Jess has a PhD in program evaluation and a masters in sustainable agriculture. Her doctoral research involved adapting and testing a participatory monitoring and evaluation tool - the Most Significant Change technique (MSC) in the Agricultural sector in Victoria.

After completing her PhD she jointly wrote the MSC guide alongside Dr Rick Davies. She is also published in international journals and is regularly invited to speak at international conferences. She specialises in the evaluation of projects with complex, intangible outcomes. Today Jess’s main interests are in qualitative and participatory monitoring and evaluation approaches and she loves big picture thinking!

Having led thousands of workshops, Jess is also a highly experienced facilitator. Most of the workshops have been aimed at developing outcomes statements, program logic models and strategic plans. Jess began facilitating workshops in 1990, and is a trained facilitator in a technique named ‘participatory rural appraisal’ (which is more commonly used to help rural people plan development projects) and in Open Space Technology. Jess is a member of the Australian Facilitators network, and has been invited to run workshops at their conferences for 3 years running.

In October 2005 Jess established Clear Horizon Consulting which has grown to comprise nine specialists in monitoring and evaluation. Clear Horizon’s clients are mainly from the Australian public sector and the NGOs sector internationally. The latest innovation by jess is Participatory Performance Story Reporting which has been developed over the last five years and was influenced by John Mayne’s seminal work on Contribution Analysis.

Jess is originally from the UK and before coming to Australia she worked in the field of sustainable farming systems development in the U.K., Mexico and India. One two-year role involved Jess developing an evaluation strategy for a large participatory farming systems project for the British Government. In Australia, Jess worked for three years with the Evaluation Support Team, Victorian Department of Primary Industries. Her role was to facilitate the development of the Department’s evaluation capability. In this work Jess experimented with a wide range of evaluation approaches and techniques in addition to developing evaluation training packages. Jess made significant contributions to the award winning evaluation framework that is used by the Agriculture Division.