Meet our people – Kate Sunners
Find out more about our staff, their roles, and what their day to day looks like!
What was your path into evaluation/ARTD?
Meandering! After a degree in creative writing I worked in publishing and independent bookstores for a time, then in marketing and communications in the health industry before heading back to Uni to do a social science degree, with a focus on public policy and development studies. As a student, I fell in love with evaluation and program design after doing a narrative-methodology based evaluation. I also fell in love with interviewing while doing a research project in Amsterdam on undocumented migrant women’s access to the economy.
I then worked for several years as a consultant supporting nonprofits to put together grant-ready project plans, program logics and outcomes measures to allow them to seek funding from government and philanthropic funders. This work led me to developing a few M&E Frameworks for clients, and running workshops for nonprofit fundraising staff on the fundamentals of program evaluation.
Then I found my dream job at ARTD, where I started as Communications Officer, supporting internal and external communications, and am now in my next level dream job as a Senior Consultant.
Can you sum up your role as a Senior Consultant in one sentence?
Collaborative sense-making about how to make the world better with evaluators, policy and program staff and citisens.
What was the best opportunity/ your proudest work moment since starting at ARTD?
Being supported to take a role on the AES Conference committee for 2023 was really brilliant and I’m really proud of what the committee and AES staff accomplished pulling the conference together.
My first time project managing a monitoring and evaluation framework and plan end to end was also really exhilarating!
What is your favourite thing about working at ARTD?
Getting to work across a number of sectors affords me a privileged birds-eye-view of how things work together (or don’t), which provides me insights that I think make me a better evaluator (and human). I also really love combining creativity with analysis, especially when working collaboratively with my very excellent colleagues and the great people we get to call clients.
What does a ‘day in the life’ look like for you?
Usually a combination of thinking about processes, designing evaluation frameworks or tools, reviewing documents, analysing data and making judgements, thinking through consequences, listening, learning stuff as I go, and generally using every single soft skill and bit of technical know how I have managed to develop over the years!
What’s something your clients may not know about you?
I love books, and those that depict Meanjin (Brisbane), where I live are some of my favourites. I was once an extra in the film adaptation of Nick Earls’ book ’48 Shades of Brown’, (although I’ve never watched it). I also used to live across the road from the house where they filmed ‘He Died with a Felafel in his Hand’ by John Birmingham.
I still write creative fiction on the side, have a growing interest and practice in bush regeneration, and spend a lot of my time doing DIY house/ landscaping projects.
