CAPD’s Principal Staff

Sally Leiderman is CAPD’s President and one of its founders. She is an experienced evaluator of complex, multi-year, multi-site and multi-sector community change efforts, social justice initiatives and community/foundation partnerships, as well as stand-alone and embedded leadership development efforts. Ms. Leiderman also writes about and trains on white privilege and racial equity at structural, institutional and system levels, and presents on ways of embedding a racial equity lens into the practice of evaluation.

Ms. Leiderman is a co-creator of www.racialequitytools.org and the Transforming White Privilege, A 21st Century Leadership Capacity curriculum. She co-developed Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, and wrote its chapters on community building, interventions and evaluation. She is also the author of a chapter describing potential markers of progress towards reduced structural racism and its consequences (How Do We Know It When We See It) in PRE’s Critical Issues Forum, Volume 3 and is a co-author of A Community Builder’s Toolkit, published in seven languages. Ms. Leiderman has also published a chapter in the Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation, co-created a compendium of best or promising practices for diversity and inclusion in academia and philanthropy, looking at outreach, recruitment, inclusion and retention with attention to the level of evidence supporting each recommended practice. She is also a peer reviewer for The Foundation Review.

Ms. Leiderman is currently directing an evaluation of the Thriving Rural Communities Initiative and a separate evaluation of the Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities Initiatives, both funded by the Duke Endowment and operated as a partnership among The Duke Endowment, the Duke Divinity School and the Western North Carolina and North Carolina Conferences of the United Methodist Church. She has designed and implemented many other large-scale, cross-site, multi-year and mixed methodology evaluations, particularly in the areas of improving children’s outcomes, social justice and community change (Project Change, Communities Creating Racial Equity, Communities for All Ages, Co-creating Effective and Inclusive Organizations and others), as well as evaluations of several identity and value-based leadership efforts (Berrie Fellows, Community Leadership Program, Healing the Heart of Diversity and Americans for Indian Opportunity Ambassadors Program and others). You can download Sally’s complete resume here.

S.A. Stephens, Ph.D., Vice President, has 35 years’ experience in policy research and evaluation. Dr. Stephens has directed and been principal investigator on a number of projects related to improving the outcomes of children, youth and families, particularly low-income families and children of color, through organizational and systems change. He has worked with state and city governments and with community groups and organizations to develop indicators and tracking systems for child and family outcomes, including those related to early child development, school readiness, and school achievement. He regularly provides strategic planning and assessment consultation using a theory-of-change approach to foundations, service provider organizations, and community-based collaborative groups. 

Current and recent evaluation projects include the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving’s early childhood/K-12 education system change strategy, the United Way of Pioneer Valley’s community impact education initiative, a public housing-based comprehensive family engagement and early literacy project in western Massachusetts,  the field test of New York State’s early childhood QRIS,  and a multi-year foundation-funded initiative in Connecticut supporting early education policy change efforts at both the community and state levels.  Earlier projects include evaluating 21st Century Community Learning Center initiatives in rural Minnesota and family support centers in Maryland and Philadelphia, as well as directing CAPD’s School-Based Initiative for Adolescent Parents and Their Young Children.  His recent work includes evaluation services to the New York Early Childhood Advisory Council through the BUILD Initiative, expert consultation to the QRIS Committee of Connecticut’s Early Childhood Council in developing criteria and indicators for quality standards for center-, school-, and home-based providers, and strategic reviews for national and regional foundations investing in early childhood programs and initiatives.  

Dr. Stephens continues as CAPD's Vice President. Since 2014, he also serves as director of the DHHS-funded Child Care and Early Education Research Connections project at the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at Columbia University. In that position, Dr. Stephens increased the production of timely, policy-oriented resource materials and their publication on the project’s website, semi-monthly e-newsletter, and daily social media messages.  He also increased the project’s collaboration with the Office of Child Care’s Child Care (OCC) Technical Assistance Network, providing research resources to state Child Care Development Block Grant administrators, and with the DHHS/ACF Child Care Policy Research Consortium, coordinating the development and distribution of Research Connections research bibliographies for its work groups.  

Before joining CAPD, Dr. Stephens was Senior Survey Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, where he specialized in evaluation design, methodology, and survey techniques. Dr. Stephens' resume may be found here. 

Stephanie Halbert Jones, Project Director, has been with CAPD since 2011. She directs CAPD’s contributions to www.racialequitytools.org and is a member of the development partnership for Transforming White Privilege: A 21st Century Leadership Capacity. She is also experienced evaluator and researcher with particular skills in data analysis and visualization, and design of complex evaluations. She has an M.A. from Clark University, where she was graduated summa cum laude from its International Development and Social Change program, with a concentration in Monitoring and Evaluation. Her specific interests include gender, race/ethnicity, labor rights and fair and alternative models of production and trade.

Ms. Halbert Jones is co-investigator on CAPD’s Thriving Rural Communities Initiative evaluation (1.0 and 2.0) and the Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities Initiative 1.0, and is taking the lead on the next phase of that evaluation (Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities 2.0). With Zuri Murphy of Social Insights, she is also co-director of an evaluation and learning project for the Pathways to Freedom Initiative, a three city effort focused on innovative solutions to human trafficking. She played a similar role in CAPD’s learning and documentation effort for an Equity Learning Partnership of 16 communities in Connecticut, funded by the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund. 

Prior to joining CAPD, Ms. Halbert Jones taught English for 15 months in Beijing, China and apprenticed with a family of jewelers in Dhrangadra, Gujarat, India. She was awarded a B.A. Magna Cum Laude from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and also holds an Associates Degree from the Haywood Community College’s Professional Crafts program, in metalwork. Ms. Halbert Jones’s Master's thesis on the Artisan Fair Trade Sector is available through Clark University's website; her undergraduate thesis explored the Folk School Movement in North Carolina. In addition to her full time work at CAPD, she works as a fiber and metal artist. Ms. Jones’s resume may be found here. Find her on linkedin here.