Hi, my name is Travis Tatum and I currently work as an independent evaluator through my company Creative Research Solutions, LLC. As President of the Atlanta-area Evaluation Association it is my pleasure to welcome you to our affiliate’s AEA365 week! This week, our members will be contributing AEA365 posts with advice, best practices, and new tools based on their experiences in evaluation.
Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the Atlanta-area Evaluation Association serves evaluators with a wide variety of backgrounds and areas of focus. Of course, since the CDC is based in Atlanta, we have a particularly large population of public health evaluators among our members. In recent years, AaEA has grown substantially. This year we have been working to develop our organizational processes to ensure that we can support and sustain our continued growth.
AaEA typically provides monthly events for our members, which alternate between professional development events and social activities. We are volunteer based, and have several committees focused on different aspects of our activities:
- The Programming and Professional Development Committee, led by Karen Anderson and Ayana Perkins, creates and organizes our monthly professional development and social activities.
- The Membership and Networking Committee, led by Willliam Moore and Tekla Evans, handles new member recruitment and registration.
- The Communications Committee, led by Linda Baffo and Linda Vo-Green, develops our email newsletter and manages our website, http://atl-eval.org.
- The Finance Committee, led by Brandy Peterson and Judy Gibson, develops the budget, monitors the financial position of the organization, and helps identify ideas for fund raising.
In addition to the committee chairs, our board includes a President (myself), a President-Elect (Sarah Gill), and a Past President (Kari Cruz); we work together to guide the overall direction of the organization and support each of our committees however we can.
Hot Tip: Each of these committees are often in need of additional volunteers, so if you are a member in the Atlanta Area, we welcome your participation!
Hot Tip: Being part of a local affiliate can carry a lot of benefits for evaluators.
- As an independent evaluator, I personally have made connections through AaEA that have led to new contracts and other business opportunities.
- Members who work for larger companies can benefit from networking and professional development through AaEA.
- Having a local community of people who care about evaluation makes it much easier to find partners to collaborate with on larger projects.
Rad Resource: The fastest way to find your local affiliate is to visit the local affiliates page on the main AEA website: List of local affiliates.
I am both grateful and excited for our members to share their insights. I hope that you will also find our members’ contributions helpful every day this week!
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Atlanta-area Evaluation Association (AaEA) Affiliate Week with our colleagues in the AaEA Affiliate. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from AaEA Affiliate members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.