Ella Gifford-Hawkins is a managing consultant at Mathematica with extensive experience in TANF program administration, training and technical assistance, coaching, and program improvement.
Gifford-Hawkins develops and delivers trainings for family support agencies and facilitates communities of practice that help staff strengthen community engagement and apply human-centered design, qualitative research, and other approaches to improve services. She also works with TANF programs across the country, coaching leaders and frontline staff to implement goal-centered, motivation-driven practices and use the Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI²) framework to strengthen program operations and outcomes.
Ella brings more than two decades of direct human services and workforce program experience to this work. Before joining Mathematica, she managed Larimer County, Colorado’s TANF program for nearly 20 years, where she led its transformation to a goal-oriented coaching model informed by behavioral science and helped develop and test innovative approaches to supporting families’ employment and self-sufficiency. Earlier, she worked directly with TANF participants as a bilingual employment coach. Ella holds a B.A. in Spanish from Colorado State University.
The purpose of this brief is to describe how the FaDSS program used a data-driven reflection process to understand how well virtual coaching is meeting the needs of families and whether families may want a mix of remote and in-person coaching options in the future.
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