Our Eco-System of Global Consultants

Sumita has a Ph.D in Cultural Neuropsychology and collaborates with the TropiBio project at CIBIO in bringing about greater equality, diversity, and inclusion within their conservation research.

Sumita’s areas of expertice include interdisciplinary research gender, inequality in STEM, community engagement, equality, diversity and inclusion, community engagement, decolonization in science, visual perception and cultural neuropyschology,

Characteristics that have often been designated to her include: woman of color, queer, Indian-American, child of immigrants, child of a refugee, foreign, academic, artist, dancer, and the list continues. And though she can identify with much of the experiences that these terms encompass, she states it would be inaccurate to say they fully represent her identity. She does, however, identify as a human with patience, observance, resilience, and kindness as her guiding principles.

Bob Williams is an internationally recognized evaluation consultant, trainer, and author based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Known for his pioneering work in applying systems thinking to evaluation, he has authored and co-authored several influential books, including Wicked Solutions and Systems Concepts in Action. Bob’s career spans decades of supporting organizations with evaluation, strategy development, and large-scale facilitation processes across the globe. A recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Paul F. Lazarsfeld Evaluation Theory Award, he is celebrated for advancing systemic approaches that foster learning, organizational change, and meaningful impact

Jill is a highly skilled evaluator and analyst with experience spanning; mainstream and indigenous health care, higher education and for-profit organisations, working across urban, regional and remote Australia. She is curious, observant and has excellent critical thinking, analytical, problem solving and evaluative skills.

As both an evaluator and systems analyst, Jill has significant experience in designing and implementing evaluation frameworks and projects and organisational systems to support effective data collection and use, to enable timely, credible and evidence-based solutions and decision making. Jill has experience in organisations that set policies, determine priorities and allocate funding, as well as those delivering services who seek to understand community needs and program impacts.

Jill has excellent communication, coordination and facilitation skills and is known for her professionalism, collaborative and diplomatic approach. Throughout her career Jill has developed networks and convened collaborative professional groups at local and national levels to build capability, share resources and solve problems.

Jill has a Masters of Evaluation, a Masters of Business Information Systems and Bachelor of Education and is a committee member with the Australasian Evaluation Society and an honorary fellow with the Centre for Program Evaluation at the University of Melbourne. Jill is based in Cairns, Australia and is a committed environmental conservationist working with local volunteer groups for the reforestation of indigenous rainforest in the Cairns region.

Rochelle Sherlock, M.A. is a Leadership and Organizational Effectiveness consultant specializing in Executive and Board development, business optimization, creating effective organizational cultures, and building capacity to support organizations to scale. Rochelle has worked across corporate America, in local government, and NGOs, including those in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Guatemala for over 20 years. Highly committed to gender equality and empowerment, she was the cofounder and first Chair of the Solano Commission for Women and Girls, and co-author of the Status Report for Women and Girls. She was the Congressional and Senate Woman of the Year (2018 and 2017). Rochelle provides leadership development training and executive coaching for senior leaders in the public, private and social sectors. She has pivoted her operations to online, which has provided greater connectivity and inclusion of people from all over the world.

He has international experience in different countries of the American Continent and he worked mainly in the sectors with medium and big enterprises: bank, retail, telecommunications, government, manufacture and media.

– PhD in Management, University of Hull (UK)
– Masters in Business Administration from the same institution in the year 1992.
– Chemical Engineering graduate from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Campus Monterrey-Mexico, in December 1988.

Leidy Kirely Rivera, MA, Cali, Colombia. Leidy has professional experience in formulating plans and evaluating intervention projects. Her research and expertise includes post conflict-agreement frameworks, field work with ethnic and multicultural communities of Valle del Cauca (Indigenous, Afro-descendant and peasant), territorial coordination, training in public management, citizen participation, human rights and international humanitarian law. Interests include issues related to victims, peace building, rural development planning and social ordering of rural property. She specializes in teamwork and identifying and achieving high-level goals and objectives.

Dr Kathy Raffel, has an MSW, an MBA, a PhD and a graduate certificate in alternative dispute resolution. Throughout her career, she has been involved in educating community members, graduate students and professionals. Kathy has extensive experience in curriculum and instructional design which she has applied in the classroom, online, and in community settings. Her favorite topics to teach are: inter-professional collaboration; plain language communication; quality improvement methods; participatory research approaches; conflict resolution strategies; program planning, management and evaluation; and applied ethics. Since retiring from full-time teaching, she has been mentoring emerging leaders in NGOs and non-profit organizations.

Nathalia Muñoz Ballesteros, MA, Cali, Colombia. Nathalia is a sociologist specializing in social transformation processes, and master’s student of public policy. She has more than ten years’ experience in university teaching, research (management of qualitative and quantitative methods), design, execution, systematization and evaluation of social transformation projects. She specializes in building relationships of trust with work teams, conflict management and horizontal dialogue with communities.

Gerald Midgley is Professor of Systems Thinking in the Centre for Systems Studies, Faculty of Business, Law and Politics, University of Hull, UK. He also holds Adjunct Professorships at Linnaeus University, Sweden; the University of Queensland, Australia; the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Mälardalen University, Sweden; and Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He has held research leadership roles in both academia and government, having spent eleven years as Director of the Centre for Systems Studies at Hull, and seven years as a Senior Science Leader in the Institute for Environmental Science and Research (ESR), New Zealand. Gerald has written over 300 papers for academics and practitioners on systems thinking and community operational research, and has been involved in a wide variety of public sector, community development, health service, technology foresight and resource management projects. He was the 2013/14 President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, and has written or edited twelve books. These include: Systemic Intervention: Philosophy, Methodology, and Practice (Kluwer, 2000); Systems Thinking, Volumes I-IV (Sage, 2003); Community Operational Research: OR and Systems Thinking for Community Development (Kluwer, 2004); Forensic DNA Evidence on Trial: Science and Uncertainty in the Courtroom (Emergent, 2011); and the Routledge Handbook of Systems Thinking (Routledge, 2021).

Molly has worked in the field of Wildlife Conservation for over 25 years. Her areas of expertise are in community engagement, strategy development for wildlife conservation and capacity building. Molly most enjoys working with practitioners to identify root issues causing negative interfaces between people and wildlife but then working together to implement strategies for maximum conservation impact and optimum human well being.

Molly has a Masters in Environmental Education.

Dr William Liley (MBBS) is Managing Director and Co-founder of Violence Prevention Australia. He currently works in rural and remote primary care and works to further trauma informed practice and evidence foundation of Primary Care. He has keen interests in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health, family medicine, violence and infant injury prevention. He has a background in physical therapy and education and holds an Adjunct Professor of Research at James Cook University. William is a Fellow of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.

Dr Margaret Korosec, PhD, MA, is a digital and online learning specialist, bringing together learning design principles and technology to enable access to learning and provide educational solutions for unique global contexts. She draws on her intuition and experience in education in leading and contributing to development projects.

Margare is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) in the UK. She earned her PhD at the University of Hull researching the perceptions, concerns, and practices of change facilitators in relation to technology enhanced learning strategy in higher education. Margaret has a positive track record in enabling organisational change, creating online courses with activity-led learning design, conducting pedagogic research, and designing and developing online degrees and professional development short courses. She was born in Germany, baptised in Italy, raised in California and has lived and worked in USA, UK.

Tashi Dendup is a Young and Emerging Evaluator (YEE) from Bhutan who advocates on inclusion of young people in all stages of evaluation. He studies Master of Global Development at Griffith University, Brisbane and holds Postgraduate Diploma in Public Administration and Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Development. He also did multiple certificate courses in Project and Programme management, Monitoring and Evaluation including gender transformative evaluation.

Tashi worked with intergovernmental organization SAARC Development Fund in Thimphu as Program Officer for over a year and as Civil Servant with the Royal Civil Service Commission of Bhutan for about three years. Besides these, he engages with EvalYouth Bhutan, EvalYouth Asia and Asia Pacific Evaluation Association advocating on youth-in-evaluation, capacity development of YEE and undertakes evaluation assignments.

As a young development professional from a developing country, Tashi is intrigued by EoE’s approach of Inclusive Systemic Thinking in addressing cross-sectoral issues. His engagement with EoE will enhance his professional expertise and experiences preparing him to contribute in his own community back home to tackle development issues.

He is passionate about evaluation, especially the programs that involve youth, children, women, and marginalized community. He loves using gender transformative lenses in evaluating programs and projects.

Monica Gagliano is a Research Associate Professor in evolutionary ecology and former fellow of the Australian Research Council. She is currently based at Southern Cross University where she directs the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Though she began her career by studying animal behaviour, she quickly turned her attention to plant behaviour and cognition. In recent years, she has blazed the trail for a brand new field called plant bioacoustics, showing that plants do make sounds; and by demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. Her studies have led her to author numerous groundbreaking scientific articles and to co-edit The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lexington Books, 2015), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy and Literature (Minnesota University Press, 2017) and Memory and Learning in Plants (Springer, 2018). Her research transcends the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism and encourages us to rethink plants as people–beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices.

In her latest book, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018), which she calls a “phyto-biography”, she describes her experiments that opened the space to begin to understand how to make contact with this other-than-human intelligence. For more information: www.monicagagliano.com

Cristina Freitas-Benedek, MBA, Sydney, Australia, has 15+ years of experience in project design, management, review of governance and donors’ initiatives for a vast array of projects, including monitoring &evaluation, business development, coaching young leaders and small businesses in Timor-Leste, Asia, and Pacific country. Cristina is bilingual and brings an extensive professional network and a strong policy lens of social, economic, and political development In Timor-Leste. She has excellent analytical, written, and verbal communication skills. Cristina is also a member and volunteer with the Rotary Club of Lower Blue Mountains, Sydney, and was a past President for the Rotary Club of Dili, Timor-Leste.

Francesca Earp is a development scholar, practitioner and consultant trained in Animal and Veterinary Bioscience and Global development. Francesca holds her Bachelor of Animal and Veterinary Bioscience (Hons) from The University of Sydney and is currently completing a Masters in Global Development at James Cook University as well as a Master of Philosophy (Science) at The University of Sydney. She is a commencing PhD candidate at James Cook University in 2022. Her core research interests include gender equity, cultural sensitivity and female empowerment. Francesca’s passion for gender equitable development began during her time as the In-Country Implementation Officer for two Agricultural development programs based in Lao PDR. Since then she has worked on several projects focusing on the design and delivery of culturally sensitive agricultural extension programs. Since 2021 Francesca has been the SDG 5 Gender Ambassador for Picture You in Agriculture.

Professor Hurriyet Babacan has a distinguished career over the last 25 years with a proven track record of achievement in senior leadership and strategic management roles in higher education, public administration and policy, public-private partnerships and the NGO sector. Hurriyet has extensive background in research, facilitation and training in a range of areas such organisational change management, strategic planning, social and economic impact assessment, evaluation and monitoring, gender responsiveness, cultural competency, feasibility studies, leadership development, business case development, building teams, strengthening corporate performance, governance, systemic change and engagement. She has worked on numerous social, economic and community issues including gender, cultural diversity, resilience, community development, wellbeing, economic development, rural/regional development, governance and policy development, natural resource management, sustainability, climate change, disaster risk management and resilience, amongst others.

Guilhermina de Araujo is a research associate and Australian Award alumni with a degree in community development. Amina is the project manager for a program of research and capacity building on the health system response to violence against women in Timor-Leste. She has expertise in qualitative research, especially interviews with vulnerable people, as well as experience in developing training materials and creative research outputs using film and participant narratives. Amina is a passionate woman’s rights advocate and is interested in doing research to inform policy and improve practice.