Dr. Matthew Shepherd

Dr. Matthew Shepherd is the owner and CEO of Midwest Evaluation and Research (MER), based in Emporia, Kansas. MER provides capacity building and program evaluation and consulting exclusively to not-for-profit organizations (NGO’s, foundations, schools and government entities) in the arenas of healthy marriage and responsible fatherhood programming, reentry programming, workforce development, and organizational effectiveness. Dr. Shepherd has more than 25 years of experience in program design and implementation, applied research, program evaluation, policy analysis, and the provision of evaluation-based technical assistance. His “real world” evaluation and programmatic work has helped funders, decision makers, program staff, and stakeholders understand how complex systems work and how they can be improved. With regard to the present Reentry Summit, Dr. Shepherd is the principal investigator on multiple evaluation studies in partnership with The RIDGE Project.