Our Team
Cathy Hearn
As an Associate Director in Renaisi’s consultancy team, Cathy focuses on the ways that data and learning can drive the evolution of social change approaches. Working with partners to support and challenge conventions on how power is held, her work explores how social sector professionals can centre relationships and hold complexity in ways that support meaningful change.
About Cathy
Cathy’s professional background brings together service delivery and design experience with mixed methods evaluation and research training. Her work sheds light on the relationships, dynamics and resource flows that make up social systems. She plays close attention to how social sector professionals recognise their power and position, and how power holders can be accountable to the communities they aim to support.
Cathy specialises in generating insights and learnings that feed into the ongoing design and evolution of social change work – a process that is often referred to as a developmental evaluation or learning partnership. Her methodological know-how spans a wide range of research and evaluation methodologies, including participatory and creative qualitative approaches, survey design and validation, and quantitative data visualisation.
Drawing on her professional roots as an educational youth worker, Cathy specialises in youth empowerment and educational inclusion. Alongside these areas, her portfolio covers wellbeing, housing and homelessness. While at Renaisi, Cathy has partnered with organisations including BBC Children in Need, the Greater London Authority, Right to Succeed, AllChild and Sport England.
Cathy’s work at Renaisi
Cathy holds strategic partnerships and drives business development for Renaisi’s consultancy team. She leads a portfolio of research, evaluation and learning partnerships.
Cathy’s specialisms
- Developmental evaluation and learning partnership
- Theory-based evaluation
- Mixed methods approaches
- Data visualisation & output design
- Training and capacity building
- Mentorship and coaching
- Equity-informed approaches
- Educational inclusion
- Youth empowerment
- Wellbeing
- Housing and homelessness
Portfolio
Cathy directs a range of evaluations, research and learning partnerships, including:
- Lead learning partner with Mission 44’s Preventing Exclusions Fund, in collaboration with ImpactEd. The Preventing Exclusions Fund focuses on convening an ecosystem around creating more inclusive education systems and reducing disproportionate school exclusions.
- Monitoring and evaluation partner for the Peer Action Collective, a joint investment by the Youth Endowment Fund and #iwill Fund. The Peer Action Collective aims to reduce youth experience of violence through a youth-led design that combines peer research and social action.
- Evaluation and learning partner for The Royal Foundation’s Homewards programme, delivered in partnership with Ipsos UK. Homewards supports coalitions across England to develop locally-led approaches to ending homelessness.
- Evaluation and learning partner for the #iwill fund, supported by The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department of Culture Media and Sport. Part of a consortium led by Dartington Service Design Lab, the #iwill Fund represents a significant, collaborative and long-term investment to support high-quality youth social action cross England.
- Action research partner for Burnley’s place-based Collective Futures partnership, supported by the Youth Futures Foundation. The Collective Futures programme supports place-based partnerships fostering local solutions to employment challenges faced by marginalised young people.
- Evaluation partner for two youth programmes funded by London’s Violence Reduction Unit: Firstly, the Stronger Futures programme aims to improve access to positive opportunities during organised evening- and weekend programmes for young Londoners. Secondly, the Maia and Lift programme, led by Ecorys, supports young women and girls at risk of domestic abuse or exploitation.
