In this episode of It Depends, Matt and Tenille speak with Dr Luke Craven, CEO of PLACE Australia (Partnerships for Local Action and Community Empowerment), a first-of-its-kind effort to connect, resource, and strengthen place-based initiatives nationally.

Luke shares PLACE's defining insight from engaging with 53 place-based initiatives across the country: that effective place-based work is fundamentally about governance, not geography. He outlines the three principles -subsidiarity, accountability, and partnership - that PLACE believes underpin meaningful place-based practice, and explains why being "domain neutral" allows them to act as ecosystem engineers, connecting practitioners solving similar challenges across early years, net zero transition, criminal justice, and beyond.

This Episode is a thoughtful conversation about what it takes to move place-based approaches from novel to normal, and why being tight on purpose but loose on the how might be the key to lasting systems change.

If you like what you hear sign up for our mailing list! We share resources, publications, and other ways to learn. You can also find Matt and Tenille on LinkedIn, or visit our website.

Check out past episodes on Resilience in Place (#12 with Gretel Evans), Complex Adaptive Systems in Emergency Management (#8 with Todd Miller), Value for Money in Evaluation (#11 with Julian King) to explore threads that came up in this episode.

Links to resources mentioned or relevant to the episode:

• PLACE Australia – including their Practice Framework
• Place Matters UK – PLACE's counterpart organisation in the United Kingdom
• The Good Shift – Ingrid Burkett's work on systems approaches and visual storytelling
• Fire to Flourish – Paul Ramsay Foundation initiative supporting community-led disaster recovery
• Logan Together – place-based initiative in Queensland focused on early years
• Regen Melbourne – place-based urban regeneration across metropolitan Melbourne

Can a dishwasher be an indicator of community resilience?

In this episode of It Depends, Matt speaks with historian and social researcher Dr Gretel Evans about the powerful intersections between storytelling, place, disaster, and community resilience. Drawing on her work in oral history, migration, and environmental history, Gretel shares how her research into floods and bushfires led her into large-scale, place-based recovery through the Fire to Flourish program at Monash University.

Gretel touches on the upcoming Community Disaster Resilience Capability Framework, outlining six key capabilities that support stronger, more connected communities before, during, and after disaster. The conversation explores why community resilience is collective, not individual, and how unexpected infrastructure - like community dishwashers- can play a vital role.

The conversation also dives deep into the role of storytelling and oral history in understanding resilience. Gretel reflects on the ethical dimensions of interviewing, data ownership, trauma, and the potential for community-owned story archives as a future pathway. This is a rich and thoughtful conversation about how history, memory, and lived experience shape the way communities recover, adapt, and imagine their futures—and why numbers alone can never tell the full story.

If you like what you hear sign up for our mailing list! We share resources, publications, and other ways to learn. You can also find Matt and Tenille on LinkedIn, or visit our website.

Check out past episodes on Indigenous Data Sovereignty (#3 with Skye Trudgett) and Complex Adaptive Systems in Emergency Management (#8 with Todd Miller) to explore threads that came up in this episode.

Links to resources mentioned or relevant to the episode:

• Oral History and Folklore collection at the National Library of Australia
• Oral History Australia - if you want to learn more about oral history
• Fire to Flourish Knowledge Centre - the Toolkit and other materials will be posted here when they are publicly available
• A systematic review on co-design, place-making and social capital that Gretel contributed towards.

We talk a lot about what evaluation is. Methods, models, frameworks, competencies. All the pieces we use to make sense of complex systems. But what about the people doing the work. How do we think, learn, and navigate the field, especially at a time when artificial intelligence is influencing how knowledge is created, interpreted, and judged.

In this episode, Dr Bianca Montrosse Moorhead helps us look beneath the surface of evaluation practice. We explore the classic fox and hedgehog metaphor and what it reveals about how evaluators operate, why our tendencies matter, and how identity shapes the judgments we make. From training the next generation of evaluators to working with the rapid rise of AI, Bianca brings a grounded and thoughtful perspective on where the field is heading and what it asks of us.

Tenille is on leave this week, so Matt is flying solo. Thankfully Bianca is here to keep him company as the two wander through philosophy, practice, technology and the big questions about value and purpose in evaluation.

If you like what you hear sign up for our mailing list! We share resources, publications, and other ways to learn. You can also find Matt and Tenille on LinkedIn, or visit our website.

Resources from the episode:

• Evaluation Foundations Revisited: Cultivating a Life of the Mindful Practitioner by Thomas A Schwandt
• Evaluation Essentials: From A to Z by Marvin C Alkin, Anne T Vo and Christina A Christie
• Core Concepts in Evaluation: Classic Writings and Contemporary Commentary edited by Lori Wingate, Ayesha Boyce, Lyssa Wilson Becho and Kelly Robertson
• Evaluation Criteria for Artificial Intelligence by Bianca Montrosse Moorhead

And keep an eye out for Using Generative AI in Evaluation Practice edited by Carrie Bruce, Valentine Gandhi and Stephan Bony - it's not yet released but will be coming soon and will be open-access.