Welcome to my professional and scholarly portfolio.
I am a project manager and social scientist with 25 years’ experience in program development, management, and evaluation, in public agency, NGO, and academic contexts. I’m driven to help organizations realize greater potential to bring about substantive change.
I maximize organizational capacity by engaging critical stakeholders, identifying common goals, and developing a practical path to achieving those goals. My approach to program development and evaluation is strategic, practical, and analytically rigorous.
How can programs and policies best achieve the results that we intend them to? And how can people with different interests find common ground to collaborate in achieving those results? This website highlights my work exploring these persistent questions in the context of social issues, the environment, and food and agriculture.
Social Issues
I am currently Director of Continuous Improvement & Performance Management at the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH), supervising a team of project managers that analyze and improve administrative and operational processes:
- establishing performance management practices, working with programs to articulate theories of change, develop logic models, and define metrics;
- streamlining personnel, contracts, and finance processes; and
- partnering with staff across CDPH and other City departments to promote civic innovation.
I came to CDPH from the Chicago Police Department Reform Management Group where I worked with CPD units to implement police reforms required under the consent decree between the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and the City of Chicago:
- forming relationships with internal and external stakeholders to help build buy-in to implementation and resolve barriers;
- developing and maintaining project work plans and schedules to meet reform milestones and deliverables; and
- creating standard operating procedures to ensure that reforms are sustained in the long term.
Building interagency bridges near Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge.
Police reform built on my earlier work serving an interagency network of regional criminal justice and victim advocacy representatives for the internationally known Domestic Abuse Intervention Programs in Duluth, Minn.:
- conducting program and policy analysis,
- improving policies, practices, and intervention programs for the criminal justice system and advocacy groups, and
- managing an extensive database.
Environment: AAAS Fellowship at US EPA
From 2016 to 2018 I helped build results-oriented collaborations at the federal level as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow hosted by the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC.
This site presents my AAAS fellowship work helping identify gaps and bottlenecks in program implementation.
Food & Agriculture
I spent the first half of my professional career as a non-profit administrator, scholar, and instructor in sustainable food and agricultural systems in the Great Lakes area of the US. This experience honed the values and priorities that have informed and driven my work since then:
- an enthusiastically collaborative approach to projects,
- a facilitative approach to education that engages practitioners as experts, and
- direct work with study participants during research fieldwork.
For Further Contact
I hope you find this website’s resources informative and thought provoking. If you have thoughts about my portfolio, new ideas you would like to share about my efforts to increase agencies’ impact, or would just like to connect, please contact me at jenifer.a.buckley@gmail.com.
Image sources: City of Chicago, the author, MN Department of Transportation, Carlton Co. (MN) Farmers Market Facebook page