About Us

Building trusting relationships.

Understanding context.

Co-designing with communities.

We center the human experience in implementation to advance equity.

The Collaborative for Implementation Practice is an initiative at the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We are a multidisciplinary, international community of professionals who support implementation and evidence use. We aim to spotlight the importance of implementation practice in building the science of implementation.

Implementation science is comprised of implementation research and implementation practice. Implementation research seeks to understand the approaches that work best to translate research evidence into real world settings. Implementation practice seeks to apply and adapt these approaches in different contexts and service settings.

What we learn from implementation practice generates more questions for implementation research to study. Implementation practice helps us test whether findings from implementation research are generalizable and is a critical component of implementation science.

Who are implementation support practitioners?

Implementation support practitioners are professionals who support implementation and build implementation capacity in human service organizations and systems. They can be referred to as coaches, improvement advisors, technical assistance providers, facilitators, consultants, mentors, and implementation specialists; and their work is grounded in a set of shared competencies.

Meet the Team

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Allison Metz

Professor of Practice
Director of Implementation Practice

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Jenny Afkinich

Postdoctoral Scholar in Implementation Practice

Mackensie Disbennett

Mackensie Disbennett

Research Specialist

Amanda Farley

Implementation Specialist

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Todd Jensen

Associate Director for Research

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Jeannette Laboy

Program Administrator & Assistant to the Director of Implementation Practice

Audrey Loper

Senior Implementation Specialist

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Nakenge Robertson

Implementation Specialist

Jen Schroeder

Jennifer Schroeder

Implementation Consultant

Hello there,

We would love to hear from you