Kristen Beaton Leadership Award Recipients
The annual Kristin Beaton Achievement Award for Leadership in Public Health Evaluation was established to recognize OPHEN members who demonstrate strong leadership in promoting and advancing the field of public health evaluation, both to their organization and to the field as a whole. This award is named after its inaugural recipient, Kristin Beaton, a credentialed evaluator and champion of evaluative thinking and evaluation capacity building.
Karen Scott
2023 Award Recipient
In her 21 years as a Research Associate, Karen has made significant contributions to research, evaluation, and strategic planning at Kingston, Frontenac and Lennox & Addington Public Health by leading high-profile projects with integrity, thoughtfulness and trust. She has built evaluation capacity by mentoring peers and promoting the use of evaluation findings in program decision-making. Karen is a champion for the importance of qualitative evaluation within public health and an advocate for evaluation to be considered at the outset of planning. With respect to innovation, Karen was part of a team that developed a novel tool for tracking and visualizing the impact of public health’s emergency response during the COVID-19 pandemic. Karen’s impact extends beyond her organization. Karen has been an active member of OPHEN since its formation and has made valuable contributions to several of OPHEN’s working groups and subcommittees. Provincially and nationally, Karen’s wisdom and expertise were sought during the first iteration of the core competencies for public health practitioners. Karen’s leadership in public health evaluation has been substantial and long-lasting.
Afroz Sajwani
2022 Award Recipient
In her role as a program evaluator, Afroz has modelled evaluation excellence for new evaluators and staff at Toronto Public Health, and through her participation in the City of Toronto’s Community of Practice for Evaluators. Afroz builds evaluation capacity through her work on numerous evaluation infrastructure projects at Toronto Public Health, including an electronic report repository and performance management guidebook. Afroz is an advocate for evaluation utilization and health equity by asking important and sometimes uncomfortable questions. She has developed innovative tools and frameworks that encourage informed decision making, increase efficiencies, and challenge others approach their work in new ways. Afroz conducted countless high-quality evaluations that positively contribute to the health and wellbeing of communities within the City of Toronto, such as the Dental Division Project Pilot assessment, which informed strategic decisions to extend eligibility to children and seniors from low income families. Afroz has exemplified evaluation leadership and made valuable contributions to her organization, the City of Toronto, and the province of Ontario.
Jocelyn Edwards
2021 Award Recipient
Jocelyn has worked at TPH for the past ten years, sharing her passion and leadership with her colleagues and organization. Jocelyn is a natural leader who is self-aware, charismatic, truly interested in others, able to engage and hold an audience, and highly capable of strategic thinking, innovation, and action.
She is an active participant on the monthly OPHEN COVID-19 Evaluation Discussion Group calls, providing guidance, support, tips, tricks, and even cheers of support to her fellow evaluators across the province. She is a true leader in public health evaluation. Jocelyn always demonstrates her commitment and passion to public health, especially rigorous and sound evaluations. She is the founding member of a Community of Practice at Toronto Public Health. This group contributes to collective learning and problem-solving among all evaluators at the City of Toronto.
Jocelyn is a true leader in the field of evaluation.
Karen Moynagh
2020 Award Recipient
With over 20 years of experience, Karen Moynagh has been an advocate, mentor and leader for public health evaluation in the Region of Halton. Karen has not only demonstrated exemplary skills in evaluation but a passion for building those skills in others as a senior program evaluator. Karen has led many evaluation capacity building efforts at Halton including education initiatives and the development of planning documents and templates. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Karen encouraged thoughtful and critical reflection of evidence to inform decision making. Through evaluation, Karen has been an essential part of the success of multiple projects at Halton including the infant feeding study, stop smoking clinic, prenatal nutrition program and most recently, the COVID-19 response.
Laura Gibbs
2020 Award Recipient
Laura Gibbs spearheaded the professionalization of OPHEN during her time as chair and was instrumental in establishing strategic direction for OPHEN during its transition from COPPHE. Laura has advocated for OPHEN and the field of public health evaluation at a provincial level by leading the development of an OPHEN position paper on public health modernization in 2020.
During her time at Oxford and Southwestern Public Health, Laura helped build the next generation of public health evaluators by mentoring students and fostered evaluative thinking among her team of planners, nurses and epidemiologists. Laura has demonstrated a commitment to building evaluation capacity in public health through her work on the ECB LDCP and later as lead for the CDP-EvaLL project.
Kristin Beaton
2019 Award Recipient
The Kristin Beaton Achievement Award for Leadership in Public Health Evaluation honours Kristin Beaton, the founder of OPHEN’s predecessor, the Community of Practice for Public Health Evaluation (COPPHE). As the lone Program Evaluator at Huron County Public Health, Kristin identified a need to learn from the work of evaluators at other health units, so she seized the opportunity to bring people working on evaluation at local public health units in Ontario together to share their experiences and help each other overcome challenges. She laid the foundation for OPHEN’s existence by organizing quarterly teleconferences, creating and maintaining a wiki site, and offering a forum for people to share their work with others interested in talking about public health evaluation. Kristin is also a champion of evaluation capacity building. As a member of the Evaluation Capacity Building Locally Driven Collaborative Project, Kristin created an innovative intervention to support evaluative thinking at her organization. She drew on evidence and experience to create activities and games to help her colleagues thinking critically, creatively, practically, and inferentially. When the time came to expand COPPHE’s reach and activities, Kristin jumped on board, becoming OPHEN’s first Treasurer and leading the Executive nomination process as the Past Chair. She has received her Credentialed Evaluator designation from the Canadian Evaluation Society, which is given to evaluators who have demonstrated significant evaluation competency. Outside of OPHEN, Kristin has also participated in the Canadian Evaluation Society — Ontario Chapter’s activities and served as a member the Chapter’s Professional Development Committee. Kristin isn’t afraid to try something new or reach out to her colleagues in the pursuit of personal and professional growth. Kristin exemplifies leadership and we are excited to honour her with this award.