Christine VanDonge, PhD
Senior Consultant
Health Management Associates
Raleigh, NC
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Christine VanDonge provides strong behavioral health expertise, leveraging her 10 years of research and evaluation experience as well as her degrees in Marriage and Family Therapy. Christine is skilled in strategic planning, incorporating stakeholder and community perspectives, and data-to-action frameworks to inform strategic actions. In addition to her early-career clinical experience, she has worked with state agencies, counties and community-based organizations, leading local evaluation plans and more than 25 strategic planning processes.
Prior to joining Health Management Associates, Christine worked with Mecklenburg County, where she was a juvenile court coordinator, a Department of Social Services senior management analyst, and most recently, health program manager in the county manager’s office. As program manager, Christine led high-impact behavioral health efforts, supporting the development of the county’s behavioral health strategic plan and managing the county’s opioid settlements.
Christine has dedicated her career to improving outcomes for at-risk populations, and she prioritizes engaging community perspectives in her planning. She has experience facilitating focus groups and community engagement sessions to understand a community’s needs and building collaborative relationships with internal and external stakeholders to better serve the needs of individuals who access behavioral healthcare systems. As a juvenile court coordinator, Christine conducted strategic planning sessions and made recommendations for changes to improve juvenile court functioning. As a senior research analyst with Applied Survey Research, she served as project manager for all projects for San Mateo Probation including the Annual Evaluation Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act and Gaps and Needs Assessment of Commercially and Sexually Exploited Youth.
Christine has extensive experience in data collection, analysis and management. She has developed data collection systems for Mecklenburg County’s Department of Social Services, San Mateo County Probation, Applied Survey Research, and the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. At CREDO, Christine designed and executed components of larger research projects, contributing to project selection, question formulation, and analysis design. She identified required data for rigorous tests of hypotheses, successfully negotiated with public agencies and other organizations to secure required data in a timely and efficient manner, managed processes for data acquisition and data quality assessment. She built datasets for analysis and produced analytic results using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Utilizing collected data, Christine created digestible reports with key takeaways that impacted policy and governance.
She is familiar with grants and proposals, both development and evaluation. As Mecklenburg County’s program manager, Christine led a competitive request for proposals (RFP) process that resulted in the disbursement of $6.25 million to 16 community-based programs. She supported San Mateo County Probation through the development of an RFP and wrote proposals for Applied Survey Research. She also has experience working on grants supported by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Department of Justice.
Christine earned her doctorate from Florida State University and her master’s degree from Colorado State University. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Clemson University.
When she is not working or cheering on her Clemson Tigers, Christine enjoys spending quality time with her two little girls, driving to after-school activities and trying new foods.