Our Team
Kathleen Shenk, B.S.
Director
Kathleen currently advises, oversees, and guides Strategies Center learning and development, capacity building, and coaching. Her career has followed a lifelong passion for promoting and supporting the health and well-being of children and families, while advancing the practice of interagency cooperation and collaboration. She is a high-performing leader in nonprofit management, and a curriculum and instructional design, learning, and program development and implementation expert. She has applied her skills across numerous topics in a diverse assortment of geographic, socio-economic and cultural settings. Kathleen’s expertise includes child abuse and neglect prevention, and the application of evidence-based approaches to address a range of social problems. As an executive director for more than 24 years, her nonprofit organization was a two-time recipient of the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Professional Excellence and she received a Pennsylvania Senate commendation for coaching excellence.
Integrating her broad experience with extensive knowledge accumulated over years of avidly reading and remaining abreast of research, Kathleen partners with clients to apply theory and evidence-based practices in diverse, real-word settings. Her unique ability to clarify and disentangle the conceptual and practice issues in complex initiatives and interventions is highly valued by practitioners from line staff to managers, and by agency and organizational leadership.
Gregory Robinson, Ph.D.
Director of Applied Research & Evaluation
Greg cares deeply about the use of information to improve practice, programs and policies. As the director of a university-based research center, Senior Research Associate with Children and Family Futures, an independent research consultant and as the Director of Applied Research and Evaluation at the Strategies Center, he has developed and successfully completed over 135 research and evaluation projects for nonprofit organizations, foundations, and for municipal, county, state and federal agencies.
Greg completed a Ph.D. and Master’s degree in social ecology, during which he learned the value of multidisciplinary approaches to social problems, and to work well with colleagues operating from different paradigms to focus on a single issue. He has moderated over 200 focused group discussions, is an expert methodologist and an advanced quantitative and qualitative data analyst, able to formulate and present research results in an engaging manner to diverse audiences ranging from public sector and nonprofit executive leadership to neighborhood groups.
His broad applied experience has honed creativity and flexibility. He understands the complexity of systems change, and the value of data to inform initiative development and to make mid-program corrections as well as to document outcomes. He consults to agencies and organizations across the spectrum of technical sophistication and understands well the importance of specifying methods and data collection strategies that do not overwhelm or antagonize community partners.
Greg’s intellectual curiosity propels him to constantly participate in professional development opportunities in all aspects of research and evaluation. His success, however, stems from his disposition to listen, to engage his clients starting from wherever they are, and to craft pragmatic, scientifically sound evaluation strategies and applied research programs at reasonable costs that inform and add value to the work of funders, practitioners and decision makers.
Richard Knecht, M.S.
Affiliated Consultant
Richard Knecht, M.S. is has been serving as the Pathways to Wellbeing Transformation Manager, since August of 2015. In this capacity, he’s provided technical and process supports to the construction of the Katie A. mandated Shared Management Structure and its monthly Community Team, where parents and youth are pursuing additional leadership voices on behalf of children and youth. He’s also delivered technical assistance to the early design and development of CCR and TFC reforms.
Since 2015, Richard Knecht, M.S. has been providing technical and change management consultation to the Departments of Social and Health Care Services in Sacramento. He is the former director of Placer County’s Children’s System of Care. Prior to Placer, he served as Sr. Vice President at the River Oak Center for Children, where he shared responsibility for nearly a decade, for a host of services and outcomes including program management and quality improvement, and where he lead that multi-site agency’s first successful Joint Commission accreditation. Richard served as Chief Operating Officer of a large free-standing behavioral health hospital in Salt Lake City. He has provided consultation services to dozens of organizations and collaboratives, both public and private.
He is presently Chair of the Board of Director’s at ifoster, the country’s online resource portal for Foster and Kinship care youth. He has a B.S. in Psychology from Brigham Young University, and an M.S. from CSU Sacramento.