Aleks started her career as an academic researcher looking at birth outcomes of refugees, cancer survival rates, and how metabolic rates change under famine conditions for the World Health Organisation. She worked for a community educational theatre group in Vanuatu, designing and carrying out surveys in Vanuatu, Fiji and the Solomon Islands on family planning methods and domestic violence. Aleks then worked for the Vanuatu Government Statistics Office, co-running their 1999 National Census. In the UK, she worked for the Office of National Statistics as a medical research analyst, an author of Social Trends, and in the 2011 Census team designing the ethnicity and religion questions. She then worked at NatCen where her focus was on the characteristics of bullying victims and the wellbeing of children.
At JRF, Aleks works to continually develop and maintain a strong network of partnerships and collaborations that underpin insight infrastructure in ways that maximise value for a wide range of organisations committed to social change. She leads insight generation projects in open collaboration with others and promotes innovation, better use of evidence, and data-driven decisions to solve social and economic inequality in the UK. All the while, amplifying the voices of people with lived experience of poverty.
Previous to her current role at JRF, Aleks was the project lead for JRF's flagship annual UK Poverty report.
Email: aleks.collingwood@jrf.org.uk
Twitter: @jrfAleks