Dr. Alexandra Walker

Alex has over 20 years of experience working in human services. From mental health and substance use treatment to reentry systems, she has been implementing innovative justice reform strategies in organizations big and small. Prior to founding ACJI with her partners, Alex has worked across the legal spectrum in residential treatment, jails, halfway houses, prisons, and community reentry programs with her most recent position being the Vice Chair of the Colorado Board of Parole. Throughout her career, Alex has been tasked with implementing numerous agency-wide and statewide initiatives to create socially significant outcomes. She led the design and implementation of a level system and case planning process across 32 halfway house programs for the Colorado Department of Public Safety, Division of Criminal Justice and held a key leadership role in the implementation of numerous legislative initiatives.

Alex is committed to the idea that organizations are in control of their outcomes. Said another way, she believes that there are reasons why socially significant outcomes have been elusive for many justice agencies and has dedicated her career to helping agencies uncover these critical, yet often overlooked, aspects of their work. As a Founding Member of the Alliance for Community and Justice Innovation, she partners with multiple government agencies to address alignment and implementation challenges that get in the way of service delivery. This work focuses on clearly identifying desired outcomes and building innovative systems to support the people, data, culture, and leadership factors that support the work.

Leveraging her experience as a public speaker and implementer, Alex specializes in facilitating small and large group workshops, presentations, and engagement events to identify and address the alignment and adaptive challenges of implementing transformational change. She is a primary facilitator and contributes to the design of the Implementation Leadership Academy and coaches organizational leaders in the application of Implementation Science. Alex holds a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a PhD in Sociology from Colorado State University.