Program Evaluation

I’m traveling to Bangalore, India right now. I’ve been meeting some foundations involved in funding programs in the area of children’s education. Recently, I
was talking to a program officer at a mid-sized foundation in Bangalore. We were exchanging ideas about how foundations should measure the outcomes of programs they fund. How much outcomes measurements is enough from a foundation’s perspective? When non-profits are so tightly squeezed for resources, what is fair to ask from them?

The focus of this paper is to describe the unique features of a youth programming model that is currently implemented by the "The Young Peoples Project" headquartered in Cambridge, MA. This programming model contributes to both individual and societal change. In summary they are:
• A focus on “peer to peer” knowledge transfer
• A focus on creating individual and collective purpose
• A focus on developing a sense of freedom about ‘work’
• A content based approach which contributes to both organizational capacity and program replicability
This paper also describes the types of outputs and social indicators that are emerging from a solid ten-year history of using this engaging program model.

Program evaluators typically have to pay attention to two opposing sides of interest and try to balance them out carefully. On the one hand, they have a stake of their own in the evaluation. In the interest of being recognized professionally, they have to please the study sponsor. If the evaluator is a staff person within a non-profit, she would be concerned about pleasing her boss and colleagues and thus advancing her career. If she is from outside the non-profit and a funder has sponsored the study, she is concerned about pleasing the funder so that they send more work her way.

A recent article by the Stanford Social Innovation Review called “Drowning in Data”(http://www.ssireview.org/pdf/2006FA_feature_snibbe.pdf) quotes “For all their sophistication, they cannot prove that they are making an impact - a requirement that many funders now demand....“ While quoting this, the article is referring to outcome evaluation designs that don’t involve randomized control groups. Yes, it is true that there are severe threats to the validity of the results of an outcome evaluation that don’t involve randomized control groups.