Evaluation
Evaluation plays a critical role for our partners. Funders, program planners, and policy makers are always seeking rigorous and reliable evaluations to inform resource allocation, demonstrate accountability, and improve essential services. Over the past 15 years, we have responded to community requests for evaluation expertise and capacity building opportunities. Within the past 3 years, there has been an increased emphasis from our partners on the need for increased capacity in evaluation within their communities.
Active Projects
In response to conversations with our community partners, who expressed the desire to better understand and meaningfully use evaluations, the Evaluation Capacity Network (ECN) was formed in 2014. The ECN bridges community-university evaluation gaps, serving as a central space where students, researchers, government, and community organizations can share and access evaluation expertise, resources, educational opportunities, and networks. Community organizations have limited resources to meet the increasing demands for evaluation that informs funding decisions, improves essential services, and demonstrates accountability.
The ECN seeks to enhance evaluation capacity building opportunities; serve as an evaluation broker by developing and implementing evaluations; develop an interdisciplinary network of evaluation stakeholders; and increase cross-sector dialogue to bridge funder and agency perspectives on evaluation. The ECN's ultimate goal is to build evaluation capacity that informs practice, programs and policy.
CUP and the Faculty of Extension are supporting the evaluation plan for the AIFY initiative. The All in For Youth (AIFY) initiative is a school-based, collaborative model of services and programs for children, youth, and families that support the overall wellbeing of students to help them achieve success in their schooling. These collaborative and wraparound supports include student mentoring, mental health supports, family supports, nutrition support, school supports, and out of school care. AIFY is currently running in 5 inner-city schools in Edmonton spanning elementary to high school age children and will carry through this pilot until 2019.
Completed Projects
CUP, Terra Centre, and Brentwood Housing Society have come together to develop a model of supportive housing for teen families using an evaluative approach. In collaboration, Terra and Brentwood provide safe, secure and affordable housing and wraparound supports to teen parents and their children. Through evaluation, the partnership will learn about and improve the current model, while understanding the impacts of these supports on the children and parents.
An initiative to study and evaluate knowledge-mobilization practices and to build both university and community capacity for community-based research and knowledge sharing.
ECMERC was a resource centre created to assist clinicians, community program staff and managers, evaluators, funders, researchers, and policymakers to understand the purposes, uses, and limitations of early childhood measurement tools.
A study of practices and outcomes associated with mentoring children in elementary schools.