About Evan Foster

I live and work in Springfield, Illinois. I am the founder of IVA, a Doctor of Public Administration student at the University of Illinois Springfield, Board Treasurer of 350 Chicago, a writer, a researcher, a husband and a father.

Most of what I do now came from being inside enough institutions to stop believing their preferred explanations for themselves. I kept seeing people held responsible for results while authority, evidence and decision rights sat somewhere else. The titles changed. The paperwork changed. The loop did not.

My early career started in the automotive industry, where I moved into finance while I was still young. That gave me a direct view of what happens when numbers stop measuring the environment and start governing it. Distorted incentives can become normal very quickly when they control the approvals, rewards and consequences.

My path later moved through biology, public health, healthcare-adjacent work, government and national nonprofit leadership. Those settings looked different on paper, but the same structural pressure kept showing up. Sometimes it was wrapped in compliance. Sometimes it was wrapped in strategy. Sometimes it was wrapped in service language. People still ended up carrying problems created by structures they did not control.

My academic path was not clean either. I left high school and earned a GED. I started in mechanical engineering and left. Lincoln Land Community College was where the academic side of my life finally stopped feeling fake. I studied business administration, joined the Honors Program and became a member of Phi Theta Kappa. Later, I completed a Bachelor of Science in Biology with a pre-medicine emphasis and a Master of Public Health at the University of Illinois Springfield. I am now in UIS’s Doctor of Public Administration program, where my dissertation work focuses on how federal tax policy reinforces financialization across sectors.

I became a founder because I wanted enough room to follow the pattern all the way down. IVA came from years of watching organizations route value, pressure and decision authority badly enough that the same people kept paying for it twice. It is not a personal brand exercise. It is the work I built because the pattern kept showing up.

My life outside work matters too. I am married to Michelle, and I am a father. Oregon, Illinois still matters deeply to me. It is where Michelle and I got married, and it still carries peace, memory and a kind of quiet I do not find many other places.

There is also a harder layer underneath my urgency. A neurodegenerative disease has moved through my family. It changed how I think about time, work, children, risk and what a serious life is supposed to add up to. I do not need that fact to become the whole story, but leaving it out would make the rest of the story too clean.

I was also raised in the LDS Church. I am less active than I once was, but that background shaped how I think about institutional life, continuity, responsibility and the obligations people carry to each other over time.

Across all of this, the common thread is simple. I pay attention to the point where what people know is happening and what the structure lets them do stop matching. That is where overload starts. That is where value gets buried. That is where institutions ask people to carry problems that should have been solved in the design.

For research and publications, visit Research. For public-facing writing, visit Writing. For current builds and independent work, visit Projects. For direct outreach, visit Contact.