This week of posts is brought to you by SFBAE, with articles written by SFBAE members and focused on the value of community for evaluators and evaluation.
Hi, I’m Jen van Stelle, Co-Founder & Principal of Actionable Insights, LLC. As program evaluators, my business partner, Melanie Espino, and I help nonprofits and government agencies discover and act on data-driven insights. We belong to our local AEA affiliate, the San Francisco Bay Area Evaluators (SFBAE).
Melanie and I have both worked in the evaluation field for many years, first as in-house evaluators and now as external consultants. In addition to program evaluation, we are involved in community assessment efforts. On our assessment projects, we work primarily—though not exclusively—with local nonprofit and public district hospitals. Our work supports their Community Health Needs Assessments (CHNAs) required by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS). We’ve long thought that CHNAs and program evaluation can be two sides of the same coin, and today we’d like to share that idea with you.
While the first phase of a hospital’s CHNA efforts ends with the publication of a report describing the health needs of the community, in the second phase a hospital learns about best practices to address the needs and selects the strategies on which it will focus its community benefit efforts. Sometimes those strategies are in-house, and sometimes they are community-based; they can be programs, services, advocacy, and the like. The IRS requires that hospitals evaluate these strategies and include the results in their next CHNA report. While the IRS is satisfied with simple reporting of outputs (“Over 2,000 people came to our hospital’s free yoga classes!”), we encourage our clients to properly evaluate the programs they fund so they can speak to the outcomes participants experienced (“80% of community members attending our diabetes management classes who had high A1c levels at the start brought their A1c levels down below 6% by the end.”).
For example, we support CHNA efforts by one of the local children’s hospitals in the greater Bay Area. When our assessment indicated that mental health was worsening among youth and that bullying had increased over time in certain school districts, the hospital chose to address youth mental health. Our research found that there were evidence-based and promising practices to improve school climate and prevent or reduce bullying. The hospital funded school-climate and anti-bullying initiatives in the local schools, and in their next CHNA report we’ll be describing the results of district-wide surveys that evaluate the frequency of reported bullying and feelings of school safety and belonging.
As we think the example makes clear, program evaluation and community assessment are much more closely linked than one might expect. We find it very rewarding to be able to play in both the assessment and evaluation spaces, connected by strategic planning and best-practices research. And because our clients know we have the expertise to cover the entire spectrum of their work, from planning and executing assessments to evaluating funded programs and reporting on results that feed back into the assessments, they trust us to support them on their journey.
Rad Resources
For more on the link between community assessment and program evaluation, consider the following:
- Bridging the Gap Between Asset/Capacity Building and Needs Assessment: Concepts and Practical Applications, by James Altschuld
- Evaluating Public and Community Health Programs, by Muriel J. Harris
- From Needs Assessment to Action: Transforming Needs into Solution Strategies, by James Altschuld and Belle Ruth Witkin
- Health Program Planning and Evaluation: A Practical Systematic Approach to Community Health, by L. Michelle Issel, Rebecca Wells, and Mollie Williams
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