Greetings, this is Jason Torres Altman from the TerraLuna Collaborative writing today about turning to publicly available data and propensity score matching to further our evaluative goals in the analysis of Public Value I wrote about in June with two programming partners. In that post, we described how a statewide AmeriCorps program provided tutoring to elementary students and desired to be able to articulate its value to entire communities, beyond just the students and members actively engaged in the program.

Hello! My name is Albion Sumrell, and I work as an Independent Consultant. Specifically, I support schools and educational organizations with monitoring and evaluating their programming. My projects primarily focus on college and career readiness initiatives for youth and adults. I recently graduated with a Ph.D. in Educational Administration from the University of New Orleans. My dissertation research also explored the impact of career readiness initiatives, such as CTE and work experiences, on assisting students in making career choices.

Greetings from the Center for Research Evaluation (CERE) at the University of Mississippi. In our roles as Evaluation Associate (Shannon) and Senior Evaluation Associate (Moira), we regularly work to engage children of various ages in research and evaluation. Using a few things that seem to work well—and many that didn’t—we hope to share some tips to give youth a voice in evaluating programs that involve them and solicit your help in compiling more.

Hello! I’m William Faulkner, Director of Data & Evaluation at Court Watch NOLA, and a member of the Gulf Coast Eval Network (GCEval – we usually call it ‘Gee-See-Eval’). As part of GCEval’s work to infuse the upcoming national conference with hands-on gulf coast experience, we’re announcing the Evaluation Without Boundaries (EWB) program!

Hi everyone! We are Tosha Shanableh, a University of New Orleans (UNO) MPA candidate, Professor Steve Mumford, also from UNO, and Andrew Holbein, Director of Resources and Data at VIA LINK. Our research partnership focuses on assessing community needs by utilizing VIA LINK’s 211 call data and resource database.

Hello. I am Sanela Muharemovic, and I’m a research analyst in the Office of Evaluation at the World Food Programme. My team, the Research and Analytics Unit, facilitates access to evaluative data and helps to improve the use of data and analytics in WFP’s centralized evaluations.

I think I’m definitely feeling like my work is online for the foreseeable future. While I do have some face-to-face sessions lined up for the fall and winter, most of what I am going to continue to do is host meetings and learning online.

Even though I have been doing that since probably 2004 or so when I first started using Skype I continue to learn about how to make online environments more interesting and, most importantly, more accessible. From time to time I put out a call to help me learn about people’s needs and experiences. Back in June I asked folks with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) how to help them participate at their best and I got lots of useful answers. I trust that the people who answered self-identified as folks with ADHD.

Hi, I’m Laura Sefton, Research and Evaluation Associate in Commonwealth Medicine, the health care consulting and operations division of UMass Chan Medical School. Our team regularly seeks to publish our program evaluation findings in scholarly journals, and I’d like to share some resources that may help you along the publication process.