This one-day workshop on Developing a Strategic Evaluation Plan for Civic and Community Engagement is the kick-off to a series of sessions designed to increase the capacity of campuses in our region to answer increasingly sophisticated questions about the impact their programs are having on students, the community, and campuses.

This first session starts with the development and use of a framework to create a three to five-year strategic evaluation plan.  Strategic evaluation plans, like any good strategic plan, enable a campus program to ensure it has the resources, expertise, structures, and procedures in place to conduct evaluations that answer an array of questions subsumed in “Are we making a difference?”  Further, using a three to five year period enables campuses to move from engaging in what are often unconnected short-term evaluations to a more strategic approach that examines a variety of questions about the impact of particular program components across populations and contexts.

This highly interactive workshop assumes that there will be both individuals and programs with a range of experience in program evaluation.  Participants can expect to:

This foundational workshop forms the basis for subsequent workshops that will examine best practices for the evaluation of program impact on students participants, communities served, and on our institutions. This workshop will be led by Cathy Burack and Alan Melchior of the Center for Youth and Communities (CYC) in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.  

About the Facilitators:

Through her work at CYC Cathy works with colleges, universities, and community organizations to use evaluation to both “prove” and “improve” their programs. Her research and capacity-building efforts attend to both outcomes and systemic change. To that end Cathy has conducted evaluations of campus-based change initiatives including conducting a national evaluation of institutional support for civic engagement, developing measures of student success, helping to set up the Corporation for National and Community Service Learn and Serve America LASSIE data collection system, and conducting multi-site evaluations on campus-wide change initiatives. Cathy is currently co-Principal Investigator of the evaluation of the Campus Compact Connect to Complete (C2C) initiative, a pilot peer-support program at nine community colleges, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the GreenLight Fund’s Social Innovation Fund initiative evaluation. Past evaluations have included Girls Who Code, serving as the evaluation partner, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Community College Transfer Initiative, an initiative designed to enable low- and moderate-income, academically able, community college students to transfer to selective colleges and universities, and of the Nellie Mae Education Foundation’s Project Compass, a program focused on the retention of underserved students.

Cathy holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Rochester, and a Doctorate in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from Harvard University. Cathy’s work is under-girded by her core beliefs in the power of reflective practice, collaboration, the importance of creating learning organizations, capacity building, and development of communities and the individuals who inhabit them.