"Moving the needles" on community-wide issues requires cross-sector coordination, an engaged community... and a new approach to evaluation.
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. 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 knowledge and experience with evaluation and are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities. It is not designed for professional evaluators. Please browse this webpage to learn more about the workshop and how you can become a member of our learning community from November 15-17 in Hamilton, ON.
Register for Evaluating Community Impact
A New Curl & Five New Workshops
A new workshop format that helps workshop participants develop concrete elements of an evaluation strategy for their work back in their home community.
- Three frameworks to organize and communicate the “progress” of community change initiatives
- Four scenarios for using hard and soft indicators to capture outcomes
- A new method for demonstrating a group’s contribution – rather than attribution -- to outcomes
- Five aides to improve the chances that social innovators and evaluators develop evaluations that are used
- A continuum of strategy – ranging from emergent to traditional – and their implications for evaluation
Who Should Attend?
This workshop is for you if:
- You manage programs that need to be evaluated
- You are part of a collaborative that is trying to understand how to evaluate
- You are a community development professional who wants to make the connection between learning and community change
- You are in a collective impact network and wanting to understand shared measurement
- Evaluation is part of your job description
Learning Agenda
- The case for using adaptive strategies to tackle complex issues
- Designing evaluations that are used: five aides for action
- Principles and frameworks for capturing systems -- rather than programmatic -- changes
- Innovative methods and tools for assessing outcomes
- Assessing a group's readiness and capacity for capturing community change
See Full Agenda
Curriculum Team
This workshop will be led by Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver. Mark is a leading practitioner in Canada in developmental evaluation and has worked in community change his entire life. Liz has run Canada's largest Collective Impact initiative and consults across North America on issues related to community change. Together, they have designed this workshop to incorporate their practical experiences in developing and measuring community impact initiatives, as well as the challenges they have faced in doing so.
