Our people
Squirrel Main
Principal
Squirrel Main is a Principal at ACIL Allen, where she leads complex evaluations, modelling and strategy work across education, early childhood, health, youth justice, employment, social enterprise, homelessness, family violence, clean energy and climate resilience. Squirrel is known for developing rigorous mixed-methods evaluations and innovative quantitative approaches that generate policy-relevant evidence for vulnerable communities and systemic change.
About Squirrel
Squirrel’s career spans over 30 years across the philanthropic, public sector, and not-for-profit domains. She has supported over 350 organisations to strengthen their monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) systems, and her work has informed strategic investment decisions affecting thousands of individuals and communities.
Squirrel brings a strong values base to her work, grounded in a commitment to generating policy-relevant evidence informed by lived experience and contexts of structural disadvantage. She is passionate about embedding reflexive learning and collaborative partnership approaches into evaluation practice.
Sector Expertise & Methodological Innovation
Squirrel has pioneered innovative evaluation methodologies across multiple complex social policy domains:
Justice reinvestment and housing first initiatives
Squirrel has developed novel approaches to measuring justice outcomes, including:
- a world-first predictive model for the Clontarf Foundation cost-benefit analysis, which estimates justice system contact risk for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people by combining a nationally validated risk framework with client-level data.
- quantitative evaluation of the Education First Youth Foyers program, analysing survey data from over 500 young people to explore how housing stability influences education, health, and wellbeing outcomes for youth experiencing homelessness.
Policy-Relevant Evidence & Systems Change
Squirrel has a track record of translating evaluation findings into actionable evidence for policy. At Paul Ramsay Foundation, she reviewed the grants involving government engagement to design a model of government engagement for the for-purpose sector. Similarly, she analysed the Foundation’s “scaling” grants to detect patterns, trends and good practice. She redesigned MEL processes across the Ian Potter Foundation grantee portfolio and analysed 19,000+ historical grants to identify trends, inform Board-level decision-making, and guide future philanthropic investment strategies across multiple sectors.
Education & Early Childhood
Squirrel's quantitative work on Australia's largest longitudinal study of early childhood education and care (E4Kids) produced rigorous analysis of large-scale survey and observational data, with a focus on exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis to support measurement validity across educator practice, child development, and learning environments. This work directly informed Commonwealth policy on early childhood provision. More recently, she has coded quasi-experimental analyses (Difference in Difference, Synthetic Control Modelling) of government education programs to discover “What Works”
Family Violence Prevention
As an ABS Accredited Safe Researcher, Squirrel brings expertise in sensitive evaluation contexts. Her work with the Paul Ramsay Foundation alongside family violence specialist services has focused on generating policy-relevant evidence to inform prevention and response strategies, with particular attention to trauma-informed approaches.
Professional Qualifications & Training
Prior to joining ACIL Allen, Squirrel held roles at the Paul Ramsay Foundation and the Ian Potter Foundation. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of Auckland, a Master of Education Policy Analysis and Evaluation from Stanford University, a Master of Journalism from the University of Melbourne and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours in Political Science & Elementary Education) from UNC Chapel Hill.