Good policy depends on whose experience informs it. At the Atkinson Foundation, the work was built on that conviction — and on the understanding that evidence, to do structural work, has to be gathered with the same rigour institutions apply to any other form of knowledge they act on.
This meant building the conditions for credible, actionable insight at scale: shaping research architecture, establishing governance structures, securing multi-level funding, and aligning coalitions of academic, community, municipal, provincial, and federal partners around a shared evidence agenda. The Black Experience Project — a landmark research initiative examining the lived experiences of Black people across the Greater Toronto Area — emerged from that infrastructure. Its findings shaped policy discourse across housing, education, health, employment, and policing, and contributed to the evidence base behind provincial anti-racism legislation and the City of Toronto’s Anti-Black Racism Strategy.
The work also extended to education policy. A senior role in the design and establishment of Full-Day Kindergarten as universal public policy contributed to one of the most significant social reforms in Ontario’s recent history — a change with generational reach, shaping educational outcomes and workforce participation across communities.
Both bodies of work share the same logic: that institutions can only act on what they can see, and that making the right things visible is itself a form of policy work.