Evaluation of the Community Leadership Project 2.0

Social Policy Research Associates (SPR), the contracted evaluator for CLP, began work partway through the first phase of CLP and has continued its role for CLP 2.0. SPR's overall goals for the evaluation are to: (1) inform improvements in CLP 2.0 implementation; (2) share lessons with the philanthropic field on effective capacity-building strategies for small organizations working in low-income communities and communities of color; and (3) assess the impact of CLP 2.0 on community grantees. This report focuses specifically on the launching of CLP 2.0 and on community grantees' characteristics and capacity levels at baseline

Understanding and assessing intercultural competence: A summary of theory, research, and practice (Technical report for the Foreign Language Program Evaluation Project)

In this report we summarize theory and research on intercultural competence, paying particular attention to existing approaches and tools for its assessment. We also review examples of the assessment of intercultural competence in the specific contexts of general education and college foreign language and study abroad programs. It is our hope that these resources will provide a useful basis to foreign language (and other) educators as they seek to understand and improve the intercultural competencies of their students

Strengthening Cultural Competency in California's Domestic Violence Field for High-Need, Underserved Populations

In 2012, The Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF)'s program area Blue Shield Against Violence (BSAV) launched a project called "Strengthening Cultural Competency in California's Domestic Violence Field for High-Need, Underserved Populations" (BSAV CC) to support and promote promising culturally competent practices within the domestic violence field. BSCF enlisted RDP Consulting (RDP) to manage the $2.6 million initiative and to provide capacitybuilding services, and provided two-year grants to 17 community partners across the state of California. The BSAV CC Project specifically sought to support domestic violence-related outreach to Tribal communities, African Americans, and recent immigrant populations.Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) received a grant from BSCF to support the learning and evaluation of this project. Over the two years of the evaluation, SPR conducted 78 phone interviews with community partners, RDP consultants, project-level evaluators, and field leaders. SPR also conducted one-day visits to 11 programs—visits that included interviews with executive directors, board members, outreach staff, key program partners, and clients. Finally, SPR attended project convenings and events, reviewed project documentation (e.g., proposals, reports), and administered two rounds of a social networking survey to all community partners. This Final Report highlights the outcomes of the two-year evaluation, at both the organizational and field levels

Building Capacity Through a Regranting Strategy: Promising Approaches and Emerging Outcomes

This is an evaluation report on the Community Leadership Project (CLP) in which 27 well-established intermediary organizations--community foundations, grantmaking public charities, and funder affinity groups--regrant to smaller organizations to provide financial support and tailored organizational assistance and coaching to small to mid-size organizations; technical assistance; and leadership development.The evaluation is interested in understanding not only the impact of CLP on leaders, organizations, intermediaries, and foundation partners, but also the key lessons on: (1) reaching and providing capacity-building supports to organizations and leaders serving low-income communities and communities of color; (2) characteristics of effective, culturally relevant, and community-responsive capacity building; and (3) which kinds of capacity-building supports are most effective for small and mid-sized organizations serving low-income communities and communitiesof color

The Legacy of the Strong Field Project - Final Evaluation Report

Since its early years, the Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF) has been strongly committed to ending domestic violence (DV) in California. This commitment to large-scale social change has led the Foundation to adopt a field-level lens for creating the conditions necessary for DV leaders and organizations to become more effective in addressing domestic violence.In response to a comprehensive scan of the strengths and needs of the DV field in California, the Foundation launched a bold, multi-million, five-year initiative called the Strong Field Project (SFP) in 2010. The SFP's ultimate goal was to strengthen a DV field that is "equipped with a critical mass of diverse leaders and organizations with sufficient capacity and the right support, tools, skills and knowledge to lead a stronger movement forward to prevent and end DV." The SFP has a three-pronged approach: (1) leadership development program (LDP), (2) organizational strengthening grants (OSG), and (3) networking building and knowledge sharing (NBKS).BSCF engaged Social Policy Research Associates (SPR) to assess the SFP's impact and contributions to strengthening the DV field. In this final initiative report, we look at the legacy of the SFP at the individual, organizational, and field levels and implications for the field as leaders move beyond the SFP to make their own legacy.SPR used various methods to assess progress towards the major SFP outcomes. These included (1) interviews with 66 SFP participants, alumni, Advisory Group members, Coordinating Committee members, and DV field leaders; (2) an SFP Alumni Follow-up Survey, (3) LDP organizational case studies; and (4) information gathered from training evaluations, pre and post assessments, observations, and document review

Revisiting Cohesive Devices in Academic L2 English Writing: What Do Successful Writers Use?

Inspired by contradictory findings and an overwhelming focus on comparing cohesive devices with the quality of writing in previous research, this study seeks to provide a descriptive, more nuanced picture of cohesion in successful L2 writing. Additionally, it investigates to what extent the use of cohesive devices varies across successful L2 writers and across different writing tasks. Writing samples were collected from different genres such as explanatory writing, text analysis, library research paper, and were analyzed following Halliday and Hasan’s (1796) taxonomy for cohesive devices. The results revealed that successful L2 writers employed more cohesive devices as well as the many subtypes of cohesion. In addition, in general, reference and conjunctive cohesion use was uniform across writers. Lexical cohesion use, on the other hand, differed more drastically between writers, suggesting that cohesion may differ more across text types than across individual writers. Finally, although successful L2 writers tend to use more cohesive devices, the presence of such devices does not guarantee a comprehensible and coherent text, so cautious interpretation on the results should be made