The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
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Interview With Karen Pittman
Karen Pittman, Senior Vice President of the International Youth Foundation, spoke about the challenges to evaluating youth development programs, issues with promoting policy changes and scale-up, and other countries’ experiences with youth development programming.
Upcoming Evaluation Conferences
Harvard Family Research Project describes a couple of upcoming evaluation conferences.
Building Local Capacity for Evaluation: The Michigan Abstinence Partnership Evaluation
Stacy Constantineau Meade of Michigan Public Health Institute writes about the increasingly important role of evaluation in enabling communities to promote and sustain change.
New Strategies in Foundation Grantmaking for Children and Youth
Heather Weiss and M. Elena Lopez of Harvard Family Research Project reveal the results of their W. K. Kellogg Foundation commission to examine trends in foundation grantmaking for children and youth.
New & Noteworthy
The New and Noteworthy section features an annotated list of papers, organizations, initiatives, and other resources related to the issue's theme of Children and Youth.
Electronic Mailbox
The Electronic Mailbox section features a list of useful resources on the Internet relating to the issue's theme of Children and Youth.
Youth Empowerment Evaluation
Kristen Zimmerman and Nancy Erbstein, Co-Directors of Community LORE, reveal how their organization promotes and supports youth participation in research, evaluation, and planning.
The Juvenile Justice Evaluation Project
Revery Barnes and Kaira Espinoza of Rising Youth for Social Equity share the results of their youth-run organization serving as the youth evaluation team on a project to reform San Francisco’s juvenile justice system.
New Strategies in Foundation Grantmaking for Children and Youth
This report examines trends in foundation grantmaking for children and youth among 19 foundations. The foundations include most of the largest and wealthiest and those whose grantmaking heavily focuses on children and youth. Survey results indicate that, because the problems of youth are interconnected and require comprehensive solutions, foundations are shifting their grantmaking strategies. Several are concentrating more resources on long-term, place-based community strategies designed to improve outcomes for children and youth.
$10.00 . 67 Pages.
Learning From Logic Models: An Example of a Family/School Partnership Program
This brief offers a step-by-step approach for developing and using a logic model as a framework for a program or organization’s evaluation. Its purpose is to provide a tool to guide evaluation processes and to facilitate practitioner and evaluator partnerships. The brief is written primarily for program practitioners, but is also relevant and easily applied for evaluators.
Free. Available online only.
Aiming for Accountability: North Carolina
Efforts include the state's performance/program budgeting system, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Smart Start.
$5.00 . 42 Pages.
Aiming for Accountability: Minnesota
Efforts include Minnesota Milestones, Children's Services Report Card, Performance Reporting, and Family Services and Children's Mental Health Collaboratives.
$5.00 . 50 Pages.
Building State and Local Evaluation Capacity: The U.S. Department of Justice's Evaluation Strategy
Robert Kirchner, Senior Advisor for Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Justice, writes about how the Department of Justice has worked to strengthen evaluation capacity at the state and local levels.
Studying Learning Initiatives: The Experience of the Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities National Learning Initiative
Andy Mott of Center for Community Change and Vicki Creed of Learning Partners discuss an approach they used to evaluate learning through the National Learning Initiative of the Empowerment Zones/Enterprise Communities Project.
State Policy Documentation Project: Data Collection and Dissemination
Lisa Plimpton of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) reports on the work that CLASP is doing to document state policies on welfare reform.
Lessons Learned
Michael Quinn Patton of the Union Institute and Ricardo Millett of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation look at criteria that distinguish casual/informal notions of lessons learned from “high quality” lessons learned.
New & Noteworthy
An annotated list of organizations and initiatives related to evaluations in learning organizations.
Electronic Mailbox
A list of useful resources on the Internet.
Learning Organizations
This issue of The Evaluation Exchange, Harvard Family Research Project's quarterly evaluation periodical, investigates what it takes for organizations that serve children and families to become learning organizations. It addresses the questions: What constraints do these organizations face? How do they do it? Who needs to be involved?
From the Director's Desk
An introduction to the issue on Learning Organizations by HFRP's Founder & Director, Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.
Useful Learning for Public Action
Heather Weiss of Harvard Family Research Project and William Morrill of Mathtech discuss implementing knowledge development investments to solve the country's basic problems.
Making the Case for Children
William Novelli, President of the National Center for Tabacco-Free Kids, writes about implementing an information campaign to inform citizens and policymakers about children's health.
Civic Participation and the Citizens Research Method
Serene Fang of Harvard Family Research Project explains the Citizen Research method to better inform and engage citizens in understanding and influencing policymaking.
Interview With Patricia McGinnis
Patricia McGinnis, President and CEO of the Council for Excellence in Government, discusses the potential of and constraints to public sector organizational learning in the current climate of accountability.
Aiming for Accountability: Iowa
Efforts include the Council on Human Investment, Innovation Zones, and the Department of Management's strategic plan.
$5.00 . 41 Pages.