Hi! My name is Sarafina Robinson Ndzi, and I’m a program evaluator at The Consultation Center at Yale. I consider ways to demystify program evaluation for non-evaluators. I believe in communicating with simplicity and making complex ideas understandable. I strive to balance rigorous methodology with commonsense clarity.

I have facilitated various program evaluations, including:

Assessing the effectiveness of a community health worker training initiative

Evaluating an afterschool music program for students in a low-income community

Conducting a needs assessment for a family-based counseling initiative

Understanding the impact of a school-based intervention on high school students’ understanding of the consequences of underage drinking

Through each project, I’ve learned ways to communicate so that teams and program participants make good use of evaluation findings.

Hello all, we are Karuna Chibber and Andrea Lozano from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation representing evaluators within philanthropy. And, representing external evaluators, we are Anjie Rosga from Informing Change and So O’Neil formerly from Mathematica (and now at Altarum). We’ve all worked together on different foundation projects, driven by the same values and desired outcomes – high quality, user-friendly evaluation products along with a process that centers equity. Yet, it has often seemed like we were working at odds with one another.

Hi, we are Cheryl Arndt, PhD and Samantha Shaak, PhD writing to you from the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health (LPPIH) in Allentown, PA. The institute, which was founded in 2021, has a unique decades-long history that you can read about here. At LPPIH, we are fortunate to be partnering with national thought-leaders who help us move forward with our work. We thought that other evaluators could benefit from knowing what we have learned about national partnerships. Specifically, our partners have helped us to: clarify the role of the health system in addressing social determinants of healthy, engage our community authentically, and access relevant data, and center equity in our place-based work.

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me …

Evaluation, the Unsung Golden Thread in an Innovative Community-Based Program by Cammie Switzer and Emily Elliot Read More »

I’m Ali Berlinski. I work as an evaluation consultant for a White-woman-owned firm in Oakland, CA, where we work with mission driven organizations, helping them use data to tell their stories. Before working in evaluation, I was an educator for over a decade, trained in Restorative Practices. Restorative Practices shifted not only my practice as an educator, but also how I approach all aspects of my life, including my work as an evaluation consultant. In this post, I’ll discuss how I use components of Restorative Practices to promote equity in my evaluation practice.

Hi everyone, this is Phil Stoeklen writing from Viable Insights – a Tucson-based evaluation and organizational development firm. I’m writing to talk a bit about the topic of IRBs and how they fit into our world of evaluation.

Research ethics bodies can take on many forms and names – Institutional Review Board (IRB), Independent Ethics Committee (IEC), ethical review board (ERB), Research Ethics Board (REB), to name a few. The names adopted depend on a host of factors, such as where the board exists and for what purpose/audience. For the purposes of this blog, however, we will refer to them all as IRBs, as that is likely the term most familiar to folks.