Emily McDonald

Emily is a social worker with master’s qualifications in evaluation and family therapy, bringing more than 30 years of experience across child and family services, youth and adult mental health, community health, family violence, and family law settings.

Emily has a background leading and implementing whole of organisation practice, evaluation and service design work. She has extensive skills in developing innovative models, programs, services and continuous improvement processes that are designed to elevate the voice of service users. She is dedicated to ensuring that practice and service developments are aligned to sector progressions, and lead to broader systems change.

Emily has supervised and lectured in child, parent and family therapy at Mindful, the Centre for Training and Research in Developmental Health at the University of Melbourne. More recently, her evaluation capacity-building work has included leading her own consultancy and collaborating with child and family relationship services, family violence prevention services, and mental health organisations. She has also worked in the Evaluation and Evidence Unit at the Australian Institute of Family Studies.