Edward Thomas Jackson

Edward Thomas Jackson
Edward Thomas Jackson
Born	February 25, 1951 Ottawa, Canada
Nationality	Canadian
Education	BA (Hon), M.Ed, Ed.D, RIPC
Alma mater	Western University, University of Toronto
Occupation	Professor, consultant
Spouse(s)	Magda Julie Seydegart

Edward Thomas (Ted) Jackson is a Canadian university professor, management consultant, and editor specializing in inclusive, sustainable finance and community-university partnerships.

Contributions

Edward Jackson’s recent scholarly and professional contributions have focused on field-building and evaluation in impact investing, climate finance, and gender lens investing in developing economies. His earlier work centered on participatory research and evaluation, Indigenous community research, local governance, labor-directed capital, community economic development, and community-university engagement, in Canada and in Africa, especially Ghana, Asia and the Caribbean. His multidisciplinary scholarship has been cited in over 200 peer-reviewed social-science journals in fields as diverse as education, psychology, sociology, development policy, program evaluation, environmental sustainability, economics, management, and finance. He has worked in 60 countries and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors.

Inclusive, Sustainable Finance

Edward Jackson has played a leading role as evaluator, field-builder, project director, and researcher in inclusive, sustainable finance in emerging markets. In the 1990s in Bangladesh, he led the conversion of a government rural-credit program to a standalone microfinance institution. In 2011-2013, working with Karim Harji, he evaluated the Rockefeller Foundation’s global Impact Investing Initiative. In 2019-2020, he and Mr. Harji evaluated Global Affairs Canada’s support to the Convergence blended finance platform. He has prepared reports on impact investing and gender equality for Investing in Women, the Caribbean Development Bank, and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, plus major studies of innovative finance for Denmark’s Foreign Ministry and of sustainable finance for the United Nations Environment Programme. Dr. Jackson’s assessment of the gender dimensions of Global Affairs Canada’s climate finance portfolio was published in 2023. He is a founding member of the Impact and Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium hosted by the Kellogg School of Management, the Responsible Investment Association of Canada, and the Canada Forum on Impact Investment and Development.

Community-University Partnerships

As a graduate student in the late 1970s, Ted Jackson was a founding member with Budd Hall and dian marino of the Participatory Research Group of the International Council for Adult Education hosted at OISE, University of Toronto , where his own work focused on improving water and sanitation systems in Big Trout Lake First Nation in northern Ontario. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became a leading scholar-practitioner in participatory evaluation in developing countries, co-editing the book Knowledge Shared with Yusuf Kassam, and working on water and local governance in northern Ghana with colleague Sulley Gariba. Later, as a tenured public-policy professor at Carleton University, he integrated student projects with non-profits into his courses on project management, program evaluation, and the social economy. As Associate Dean of Public Affairs, he chaired an institution-wide working group on community-university engagement which produced the influential 2009 report, The Oxygen of Community. From 2011 to 2014, Professor Jackson served as founding Principal Investigator of the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement project which animated partnered research on poverty reduction, inst women food security, environmental sustainability, and combatting violence against women in communities across seven Canadian provinces.

Personal Life

Edward Thomas Jackson was born in Ottawa on February 25, 1951, and was raised in Ottawa, an army base in Oakville, Ontario, and the small Eastern Ontario town of Kemptville. His father, John William (Bill) Jackson, was a professional soldier and UN peacekeeper in Vietnam and the Gaza Strip. His mother, Annetta (Anne) Marguerite Knight, was a special-education principal and lifelong advocate for persons with disabilities. His sister, Elizabeth Anne Jackson Clost, a lab technologist, became a community leader in Trenton Ontario. In 1987, Ted married Magda Julie Seydegart, a leading human rights educator and feminist and his former field supervisor for a graduate course. They had two sons: Noah Anatole Seydegart Jackson and Jacob Nicholas Seydegart Jackson, both entrepreneurs. In 2019, Jacob married physician Emily Beatrice Baxter Jackson. Magda and Ted have two granddaughters: Olivia Grace Jackson and Veronica Rose Jackson, Noah’s daughters. In 2011, integrating heritage beams from the Jackson family farm in Kemptville, Magda designed and built a lakeside chalet for the family in Val-Des-Monts, Quebec.

Education

Edward Jackson attended public schools in Ottawa, Oakville and Kemptville, Ontario, was a high school athlete, played Junior B hockey, and was student-council co-president (head boy) at North Grenville District High School. In 1974, he earned a BA (Hons) in psychology from the University of Western Ontario (now Western University). He completed his graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto , earning M.Ed (1977) and Ed.D (1981) degrees in adult education and community development. His doctoral research, which focused on community participation in water projects in Big Trout Lake First Nation in northern Ontario and Bongo, a remote community in northern Ghana, was supported by a scholarship from the Canadian International Development Agency, the first such award involving comparative research in Canada. In 2020, Dr. Jackson obtained responsible investment professional certification (RIPC) from the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment Academy and the Responsible investment Association of Canada.

Early Career

Ted Jackson’s first professional role was as a Frontier College labourer-teacher, replacing ties on a Canadian National rail line in northern Alberta during the day and teaching English to immigrant workers in the evening. Here he was introduced to the writings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, who argued that adult learners should become the subjects, not the objects, of their own history. Freire’s ideas would influence his work for the next 50 years. He then worked as a program coordinator at Frontier’s headquarters, traveling across Canada to support its volunteer field staff in mining and construction camps, fishing villages and Indigenous communities. In 1976, he participated in an international conference on adult education and development in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he met Paulo Freire and roomed with Budd Hall, who was to become a dear friend, mentor, colleague for five decades. From 1976 to 1981, during his graduate studies, Ted worked as a Project Officer with the International Council for Adult Education and Coordinator of its Participatory Research Group.

Consulting

For over 40 years, Dr. Jackson has served as President of E. T. Jackson and Associates Ltd., an award-winning, Ottawa-based boutique management consulting firm, which has provided evaluation and management services to development agencies, development banks, philanthropic foundations, impact investment funds, and think tanks active in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean with deep commitment to stakeholder engagement, gender equality, North-South partnerships, and organizational capacity building, and development impact. Key leaders in the consulting practice included Denise Beaulieu, Dal Brodhead, Brian Rowe, Magda Seydegart, and Paul Turcot. The firm’s early work focused on basic human needs, potable water, and local governance, particularly in Ghana, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. More recently the company gained international recognition for its evaluation and field-building in impact investment, blended finance, gender lens investing, higher education, and social enterprise. Jackson and Associates is a founding member of the Canadian International Development Professionals, and its work has been recognized by Canada’s Foreign Minister, Export Development Canada, and the Global Compact Network Canada.

Indigenous Community Research

Ted Jackson devoted much of his early career to facilitating and understanding community-based research (CBR) in Indigenous communities in northern Canada. As a graduate student, he worked with Magda Seydegart on Ontario North Today, a campaign that successfully stopped a multinational paper company’s proposal for massive clearcutting and triggered a royal commission. He coordinated participatory research with Gerry McKay to reverse “technical apartheid” in Big Trout Lake First Nation and with Grace Hudson to promote local employment for women. In 1978-1979, he advised the Royal Commission on Indian and Inuit Health headed by Hon. Thomas Berger. In 1981-1982, he coordinated the Native Economic Development and Small Business Management program at Trent University, a professional course for Ontario Metis leaders supported by the Donner Canadian Foundation and the federal employment department. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, Dr. Jackson authored and co-edited a series of publications on Indigenous community-based research and training that contributed to the body of knowledge informing guidelines on conducting research in Indigenous communities prepared by Trent colleague Marlene Brant Castellano for Canada’s national research councils.

Labour-Directed Capital

Forty years ago, through a project on community self-help for Dal Brodhead, then at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Ted became interested in worker ownership and investment funds owned fully or jointly by trade unions. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he published a series of research reports for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre (a tripartite body of employers, unions, and government), the Canadian Labour Congress, Carleton University, and the Economic Council of Canada on policy options, models, costs and benefits for labour-directed pension fund investing and labour-sponsored venture capital corporations. In the 2000s, he collaborated on several SSHRC-funded community-university research projects led by Jack Quarter at the University of Toronto and Carleton University’s Tessa Hebb that extended this work into the social economy and responsible investment. In 2015, Ted underscored the importance of feasible solutions for good pension plans for non-profit workers.

Ghana

From his first visit for a conference in 1976, Ted Jackson began a lifetime love affair with Ghana in West Africa. For the next 30 years he served as an evaluator and project director for a series of CIDA- funded projects in northern Ghana aimed at increasing access to potable water, strengthening local governance and advocating for gender equality, in the process supporting several cohorts of northern leaders and demonstrating the power of reciprocal North-South partnerships. Much of this work was powered by Dr. Jackson’s close relationship with the late Honourable Dr. Sulley Gariba, a consulting partner and leading pan-African evaluator, senior policy advisor to Ghana’s President, Ghana’s High Commissioner to Canada, and the founding Director of the Impact Division of Mastercard Foundation in Africa. In 2015-2016, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation and Canada’s International Development Research Centre, Dr. Jackson with Karim Harji led a pilot course on evaluating impact investing in Africa in cooperation with the Ghana Venture Capital Trust Fund and Dr. Garba’s Institute for Policy Alternatives. More recently, Dr. Jackson participated with the Institute of Development Studies and the Trust Fund in research on the social impacts of venture investments in Ghana and lectured on impact investing and gender lens investing for the Ghana program of the non-profit World University Service of Canada.

Program Evaluation

Through his consulting, research and teaching, Dr. Jackson has become one of international-development’s premier senior evaluators, selected to lead major evaluations of complex programs and projects in developing countries by the Australian, Canadian, Danish, and Swiss development cooperation programs and the Mastercard and Rockefeller foundations, among others. His 1998 co-edited book with Yusuf Kassam book on participatory evaluation was widely cited in the education, community health, environmental studies, and sociology literatures. In 2001, he co-founded the International Program for Development Evaluation Training, a residential executive development program offered jointly by the World Bank and Carleton University for more than 15 years and is now based at the University of Bern. In 2015-2017, Jackson and Associates evaluated the Mastercard Foundation’s African Scholarship Program at six North American universities. His academic and professional writing and speaking on evaluating impact investing have helped to shape scholarship and practice in that field. In 2020, he was nominated to the Advisory Council of the International Evaluation Academy.

University Administration

In 1993, with a multi-year grant from the McConnell Foundation, and in collaboration with its President Tim Brodhead and senior Carleton administrator and professor Katherine Graham, Edward Jackson established and became the founding Director of the Carleton Centre for Community Innovation at Carleton University. Engaging faculty and students from public policy, social work and business, the multidisciplinary research centre built effective working relationships with municipal governments, non-profits, organized labour, Indigenous communities, and business groups to plan and execute partnered action research in community economic development, youth business, rural manufacturing, and labour-directed investment funds. From 1997 to 2008, with funding from McConnell, Bell Canada, and other corporates and governments, the Centre operated its flagship Community Economic Development Technical Assistance Program (CEDTAP), making 450 small planning grants to community corporations, cooperatives and social businesses across Canada and facilitating the growth of the CED sector. CEDTAP has been credited in demonstrating how McConnell could build whole fields through an external backbone institution, a model the foundation would go on to refine and apply to other sector-wide interventions. In 2006-2008, Ted Jackson helped the McConnell Foundation shape its social-finance strategy in Canada. Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2023, the Centre has served as a model for other Carleton research centres while hosting leading-edge initiatives in responsible investment, Indigenous governance, social impact evaluation, and community-university engagement. From 2007 to 2010, as Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Public Affairs, Professor Jackson built the outreach and fundraising capacities of 20 Faculty research centres and chaired university-wide working groups on community engagement and partnerships.

University Teaching

Drawing on his adult education training, Ted Jackson’s university teaching methods were participatory and experiential. All his courses called for group-based case analysis and community field placements. For more than two decades, as a tenured Associate Professor, Dr. Jackson taught popular graduate courses on project management and program evaluation as well as on higher education and the social economy in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University. Teams of students from his courses worked each term with Ottawa-area non-profits and local development active in such areas as international development, immigrant integration, human rights, youth business, and social technology. A frequent conference speaker, he has also lectured on evaluation, social business and impact investing at Victoria, Warsaw, and Witwatersrand universities. In 2007, Dr. Jackson was recognized with the Faculty of Public Affairs Teaching Excellence Award at Carleton University.

Graduate Students

At Carleton University, Dr. Jackson taught, supervised, and mentored more than 500 graduate students. Many have gone on to become leaders and innovators in their fields. Former student and consulting associate, Karim Harji, for example, directs the Oxford Impact Measurement Programme at Oxford University and is an important scholar-practitioner in impact investing evaluation. His former students have taken up influential posts in Canadian government departments, United Nations agencies, foundations, universities, corporates, and non-governmental organizations. Although retired from university teaching, Professor Jackson continues to informally mentor and advise students and younger professional colleagues.

Editing and Reviewing

An Associate Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment, and member of the editorial boards of The Engaged Scholar and ACRN Journal of Finance and Risk Perspectives, Edward Jackson has been invited to serve as a reviewer by a variety of academic and professional journals, including: Action Research Journal, American Journal of Evaluation, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Canadian Journal of Native (Indigenous) Studies, Canadian Journal of Non-Profit and Social Economy Research, Canadian Journal of Program Evaluation, Engaged Scholar Journal, Evaluation Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Radical Pedagogy Journal, and World Development.

Publications

A productive, multidisciplinary researcher, Edward Jackson’s scholarship has sought to build new, actionable knowledge in innovative, emerging fields that advance democracy, equity, and sustainability. In 1982, he co-edited with Don McCaskill and Budd Hall a special scholarly journal issue on Indigenous community-based training and research. Forty years later, he co-edited with Carolina Robino the first peer-reviewed journal collection on gender lens investing theory and practice. In the years between these publications, Dr. Jackson co-edited four books on participatory research and evaluation and community development, published influential articles and chapters, authored major technical reports for development agencies and foundations, and blogged extensively. His article on applying theory of change in evaluating impact investing in the Journal of Sustainable Finance and Investment is that journal’s third all-time most read article. Overall, Professor Jackson’s work has been cited in 200 peer-reviewed journals in over a dozen social-science fields.

Volunteering

Long a volunteer member of the boards and committees of many community, professional and academic non-profits, Ted Jackson was a co-founder of the McLeod Group, a volunteer development-policy think tank. He is currently a pro bono fundraising advisor to the Coalition for Immokalee Workers in Southwest Florida, a farmworkers’ rights group. He has used his birthdays to raise funds for the Coalition and for the Diamond Development Initiative’s advocacy for artisanal miners in Africa. In 2021, on his 70th birthday, Ted and Magda established the Jackson Family Scholarship for Community Engagement in the Master of Philanthropy and Non-profit Leadership program in the School of Public Policy and Administration at Carleton University . In addition, Dr. Jackson is presently a volunteer advisor to SWEEF Capital, a women-led private equity fund in Singapore. He has also served as a pro bono mentor for young social entrepreneurs and action-research scholars in Canada and around the world.

Awards

Ted Jackson’s leadership and innovation has been recognized in the fields of community development, gender equality, development management, graduate teaching, sustainable development, and responsible finance. In 2007, in addition to winning the Carleton Faculty of Public Affairs Teaching Excellence Award he also received the Canadian Evaluation Society’s Award for Contributions to Evaluation in Canada, as well as its Karl Boudreault Leadership Award in 2012. In 2009, for his work in strengthening non-profits through community-university partnerships, he was awarded the Ontario Medal for Good Citizenship by the province’s Lieutenant-Governor. In 2020, he accepted the Global Service Award from the Alumni Association of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. In 2021, he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in the United Kingdom and received the Individual Leadership Award of the Responsible Investment Association of Canada. Dr. Jackson continues to hold honorary university appointments at Carleton and Ottawa universities and the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex.

Projects

In recent years, Edward Jackson’s consulting projects have concentrated on climate finance and gender equality, and investment readiness for social businesses, in emerging markets. His scholarly outputs have focused mainly on field-building in gender lens investing and the evaluation of impact investing in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In terms of new research, he is currently turning his attention to understanding and promoting inclusive renewable energy systems in developing economies, particularly in advancing gender equality in solar and wind projects through innovative climate investments. Another emerging line of inquiry centres on worker-driven social responsibility linked to his volunteer work with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the international expansion of their Fair Food Program, whose worker education approach draws on the methods of Paulo Freire and other social movement educators.

Interests

In addition to his professional publications, Ted Jackson has cultivated a longstanding interest in creative writing and is a published poet whose work has been put to music. He also has sustained an enthusiasm, not always shared by others, for pun-based humour and Dad jokes. In addition to editing the bilingual newsletter of his Val-Des-Monts lake association, he continues to blog and microblog on a range of issues in politics, economics, education, gender, and sport. Outdoors, he likes to hike, kayak, and cut brush. A competitive athlete in his youth, he has maintained a commitment to fitness through daily walks, weekly gym workouts, and, in various periods, racquetball, karate, seniors’ hockey, golf, and recently, pickleball. Magda and Ted are also electric-vehicle advocates and enjoy road trips, near and far, in their Tesla Y.