Building Community Partnerships in Support of a Postsecondary Completion Agenda

This report highlights key lessons from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Community Partnerships portfolio evaluation. It assesses the communities' progress over the course of the investment, and describes their work in the areas of building public commitment, using data, building and sustaining partnerships, and aligning policies and practices. The OMG Center served as the national evaluator of this initiative and the report also discusses the steps these communities can take to sustain their programs

Holistic Leadership: A Model for Leader-Member Engagement and Development

Dr. Candis Best explores the theory of holistic leadership and further provides the model and framework for it to be empirically tested. At present, Best opines that holistic leadership produces leadership which supports the development of self-leadership capacity while preparing participating members for the exercise of increasing levels of self-determination and participatory decision-making

Integrative Use of Information Extraction, Semantic Matchmaking and Adaptive Coupling Techniques in Support of Distributed Information Processing and Decision-Making

In order to press maximal cognitive benefit from their social, technological and informational environments, military coalitions need to understand how best to exploit available information assets as well as how best to organize their socially-distributed information processing activities. The International Technology Alliance (ITA) program is beginning to address the challenges associated with enhanced cognition in military coalition environments by integrating a variety of research and development efforts. In particular, research in one component of the ITA ('Project 4: Shared Understanding and Information Exploitation') is seeking to develop capabilities that enable military coalitions to better exploit and distribute networked information assets in the service of collective cognitive outcomes (e.g. improved decision-making). In this paper, we provide an overview of the various research activities in Project 4. We also show how these research activities complement one another in terms of supporting coalition-based collective cognition

The Challenges of Place, Capacity, and Systems Change: The Story of Yes we can!

· Yes we can!, a comprehensive community initiative (CCI) funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, was designed to improve educational and economic outcomes within the foundation’s hometown of Battle Creek, Mich. Since 2002, Yes we can! has supported five core strategies designed to trigger the systems changes needed to reduce educational and economic inequities in Battle Creek. · Yes we can! has achieved some important wins to date; for example, more residents are involved, more neighborhoods have stronger neighborhood associations, and more organizations are engaging residents in their decision-making processes. However, the scale of wins remains small, and the targeted systemic changes have not yet emerged. · Some common CCI design elements featured in Yes we can! may have inadvertently bounded its success: a) community building efforts targeted small-scale places, restricting the scale and scope of wins; b) demands for current work competed with building capacities for future work; and c) local partners who were implementing their individual grants struggled to maintain a focus on the larger vision and collective work

VALUING COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT THROUGH THE SOCIAL INCLUSION PROGRAMME (SICAP) 2015–2017 TOWARDS A FRAMEWORK FOR EVALUATION. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 77 FEBRUARY 2019

The Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme (SICAP) represents a major component of Ireland’s community development strategy, led by the Department of Rural and Community Development (DRCD). The vision of SICAP is to improve the opportunities and life chances of those who are marginalised in society, experiencing unemployment or living in poverty through community development approaches, targeted supports and interagency collaboration, where the values of equality and inclusion are promoted and human rights are respected. In 2016, total expenditure on SICAP amounted to approximately €36 million (Pobal, 2016a). Using a mixed methodology, this report examines the extent to which community development programmes can or should be subject to evaluation, with a particular focus on SICAP. In doing so, the report draws on a rich body of information – including desk-based research; consultation workshops with members of local community groups (LCGs), local community workers (LCWs) and other key policy stakeholders; and an analysis of administrative data held by Pobal – on the characteristics of LCGs that received direct support under SICAP. The findings in this report relate to the delivery of the SICAP 2015–2017 programme which ended in December 2017. The aim of the study is to inform policy by shedding light on a number of issues including the following. Can community development be evaluated? What are the current metrics and methodologies suggested in the literature for evaluating community development interventions? What possible metrics can be used to evaluate community development interventions and how do these relate to the SICAP programme? How can a framework be developed that could potentially be used by SICAP for monitoring evaluation of its community development programme

Continuous Improvement in Education

In recent years, 'continuous improvement' has become a popular catchphrase in the field of education. However, while continuous improvement has become commonplace and well-documented in other industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing, little is known about how this work has manifested itself in education.This white paper attempts to map the landscape of this terrain by identifying and describing organizations engaged in continuous improvement, and by highlighting commonalities and differences among them. The findings classify three types of organizations engaged in continuous improvement: those focused on instructional improvement at the classroom level; those concentrating on system-wide improvement; and those addressing collective impact. Each type is described in turn and illustrated by an organizational case study. Through the analysis, six common themes that characterize all three types of organizations (e.g., leadership and strategy, communication and engagement, organizational infrastructure, methodology, data collection and analysis, and building capacity) are enumerated. This white paper makes four concluding observations. First, the three case studies provide evidence of organizations conducting continuous improvement work in the field of education, albeit at different levels and in different ways. Second, entry points to continuous improvement work are not mutually exclusive, but are nested and, hence, mutually informative and comparative. Third, continuous improvement is not synonymous with improving all organizational processes simultaneously; rather, research and learning cycles are iterative and gradual in nature. Fourth, despite being both iterative and gradual, it is imperative that improvement work is planned and undertaken in a rigorous, thoughtful, and transparent fashion

An external evaluation of Phat Pak process and structure: Volume 1: Evaluation report

An evaluation was conducted by the 510 Evaluation Research Group 2007 after receiving a request from the Phat Pak Governance Group (PPGG). The evaluation focused on four areas identified in the Phat Pak service specification plan attached to it’s Ministry of Health contract (Youth participation, Communication Strategies, Decision making Processes and Skills Development). Our intention of evaluating the Phat Pak Programme has been to, through feedback from a range of participants, gauge the extent that the programme objectives (such as those highlighted in the contract are being met. More specifically, the function of the evaluation has been to help identify specific areas that are working well and those areas that need further development. It is our intention that the evaluation will provide both short and long-term direction with added insight towards increasing participation and enhancing health outcomes for youth and the wider community of the Waikato region