Margaret (Meg) is a senior fellow with NORC’s Health Care Evaluation department, recognized for her methodological expertise evaluating systems change initiatives addressing complex social issues, including: the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of child abuse and other adverse childhood experiences; racial/ethnic disparities in health care; place-based population change initiatives; early childhood education and juvenile justice system reforms; and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

She has written systems change evaluation methods guides and journal articles for federal agencies and foundations. She chaired the American Evaluation Association’s Systems in Evaluation Topical Interest Group from 2009 to 2015, and was honored with the Association’s Marcia Guttentag Evaluator award in 2011.

Meg currently leads projects evaluating complex system transformation initiatives in education, child welfare, and human services. For the National Public Education Support Fund, she is directing the evaluation of the Partnership for the Future of Learning, a national network of philanthropic funders and leaders of key education and social justice organizations working to advance a shared vision, policy framework, and narrative in key places across the United States, including California, Georgia, and New Hampshire.

For the KVC Institute for Health Systems Innovation, she is directing the evaluation of the Institute’s partnership with Hennepin County, Minnesota’s Health and Human Services’ initiative to transform child welfare and other service systems, using a population-based model of child well-being. Hargreaves is also the project director for the evaluation of the Change in Mind Institute, continuing her previous work as the director of the evaluation of the Change in Mind: Applying Neuroscience to Revitalize Communities initiative.

Prior to joining NORC in January 2018, Meg was a principal associate at Community Science, Inc., where she directed evaluations of multi-sector, multi-level systems change initiatives at national and international scales in climate change, juvenile justice, and health and human services. For the World Bank Group’s Climate Investment Funds (CIF), she directed an international team to design an evaluation of the CIF’s Transformation Change Learning Partnership, to review its efforts to initiate low-carbon, climate-resilient development. For the MacArthur Foundation, she directed a retrospective evaluation of the national reach, impact, and sustainability of its Models for Change initiative that worked for more than 10 years to make justice systems more effective, fair, and developmentally appropriate. For the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities and the Palix Foundation, she directed a three-year evaluation of the Change in Mind initiative, in which a learning collaborative of 15 human service agencies in the United States and Alberta, Canada used brain science research to transform their programs, organizations, service systems, and broader policies.

As a senior researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Meg directed a rigorous, mixed methods evaluation of the Study of Community-based Family Support Networks in Washington State, funded by the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Public–Private Initiative. For the project she developed, fielded, and tested the validity and reliability of the ACEs and Resilience Collective Community Capacity (ARC3) Survey, which measures collective capacity to create community-wide change. She also adapted the survey for the Population Change Learning Community, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which is scheduled for field testing in the fall of 2018.