My name is Mary Jo Pattison. My friends call me "MJ".  I provide comprehensive program evaluations for small education, health, arts, and community-based initiatives and subcontract on larger state, local and foundation multi-year grants.

From 2007 until 2020, I was Program Research Specialist at the New York State Department of Health. I was the lead evaluator for two state-wide multi-site initiatives, "Creating Healthy Places to Live Work and Play" (2010-2015) and Creating Healthy Schools and Communities (2015-2020). The goal of these two initiatives was to improve policy, practice, and environmental supports for healthy eating and physical activity in high-need communities, their worksites, and school districts. In addition, I provided performance monitoring, local level evaluation design, instrument development, data collection, training, and technical assistance to the local grantees across the state of New York.

From 2005-2007, I worked at the Evaluation Consortium at the University at Albany/SUNY as an Evaluation Specialist. I served as project manager for program evaluations of various federal, state, and local education and community initiatives. While at SUNY Albany, I took advantage of the opportunity to take research design and methodology courses and applied what I was learning to our evaluation projects.

Before moving to the Capitol Region in 2005, We lived in Rochester, New York, for twenty years. I served as a co-pastor with my husband in a city Presbyterian church for seventeen of those twenty years.

While in ministry, I focused on community outreach and, with other churches, established and directed an outreach center called "The Corner Place," which offered tutoring support during the school year and a summer arts program to neighborhood children. For our last three years in Rochester, I returned to school and received my teacher certification in secondary social studies. I taught social studies as a long-term substitute in two different city high schools.

Both my years in the ministry and in public education were wonderful training for my "reinvention" as a program evaluator.

I know what it's like to write grants, run programs on a shoestring, offer educational programs, and wonder how to document their impact. As a result, I bring to program evaluation a deep understanding of the challenges of finding funding, running a program, making improvements, and being accountable to stakeholders. My style is to work collaboratively with clients to plan the evaluation, identify data sources, collect the data and develop genuinely useful evaluation products that will help your funders and community understand your initiative.  

I now live in Chatham, Massachusetts, with my husband, Stewart. We have two grown children who live in Vermont and Quebec, Canada, and six grandchildren.