Christine Velez is a Senior Evaluator with 25 years of experience in program evaluation. For most of her career, Christine’s work and interests have been focused on housing, education and work with vulnerable populations. She serves as the co-lead for the process evaluation of Denver’s Supportive Housing Social Impact Bond Initiative which provides supportive housing to chronically homeless individuals in our community.

Christine’s strengths lie in her depth of experience working in diverse communities and in a variety of contexts.  For ten years, she was part of the team that managed and implemented the Indian Housing Block Grant (IHBG) program for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which included providing on-site technical assistance to Indian Tribes across the U.S.  She is currently the lead evaluator on the Environmental Stewardship of Indigenous Lands, a National Science Foundation (NSF) project which calls for culturally relevant approaches in all aspects of evaluation from communication with tribal members to data collection methods that are based in cultural traditions.

As a native Spanish speaker, Christine’s work with monolingual Spanish speaking communities is invaluable to ensuring evaluation is also inclusive of the Latino voice. Her experience has included conducting interviews and focus groups with a range of Spanish speaking stakeholders such as child care providers, parents, the business community and elected officials.  She coordinated and worked as a translator for the U.S.-Nicaragua Housing Policy Leadership Forum.  As the lead evaluator for the NSF National Resource Hub for STEM Education at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, she is proud to work with leaders from New Mexico and California who promote STEM success for underrepresented students.

Christine also serves as a mentor in the Leaders in Equitable Evaluation and Diversity program designed to develop a pipeline of diverse leaders.  She is a member of the Advancing Culturally-responsive and Equitable (ACE) Evaluation Network, a community of racially and/or ethnically diverse evaluators whose mission is to both drive and support the practice of excellent, culturally responsive and equitable evaluation.  She participated in the 2018 Colorado Equitable Evaluation Cohort and is committed to deepening her culturally responsive and equitable evaluation practice.

Christine holds degrees from St. Joseph’s College (B.A. in Human Relations) and Michigan State University (M.A. in Sociology).

Downtime from the office includes playing softball, practicing yoga, traveling, and connecting with family and friends.