"Moving the needles" on community-wide issues requires cross-sector coordination and an engaged community.
There are countless community change initiatives working on a diversity of issues in our country, such as early childhood development, health care, education, poverty and homelessness, immigration and workforce development, and ecological sustainability. Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes is a three-day workshop intended to provide those who are funding, planning and implementing community change initiatives with an opportunity to learn the latest and most practical evaluation ideas and practices.
This workshop is best suited to those who have an interest and some basic experience with evaluation but are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities. Please browse this webpage to learn more about the workshop and how you can become a member of our learning community from May 13-15 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, or June 2-4 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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What you'll learn
Key themes addressed during the workshop will enable participants to understand the unique approach to evaluating large-scale community change initiatives. These themes include:
- Models and dynamics of community change including Theory of Change
- The core concepts of evaluative thinking, utilization focused evaluation, and developmental evaluation
- The critical differences between traditional program evaluation and the evaluation of community change evaluation
- The unique challenges of assessing community change e.g. ‘measuring’ systems change, dealing with unanticipated outcomes, attributing outcomes to change activities, and participatory sense-making
- Evaluation Planning Tools e.g. evaluation scope of work, utilization-focused checklist, developmental evaluation checklist
- Outcome Evaluation Tools e.g. Most Significant Change, contribution analysis, multiple perspectives exercise, outcome mapping, splash and ripple
