Talking about Jara and her team as ‘evaluators’ is really limited language. They are a learning partner, a thinking partner.
— Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, Executive Director, RYSE
Talking about Jara and her team as ‘evaluators’ is really limited language. They are a learning partner, a thinking partner.
— Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, Executive Director, RYSE
Read our clients’ stories:
STRATEGY
Public Health Trust “What’s next?”
Common Vision: How do we change the conversation for long-term impact?
CompassPoint: How do we articulate our “value add”?
First 5 San Francisco: How can we become more effective at an organizational level?
EVALUATION
RYSE Youth Center: Starting Off Right
Fundraising Academy for Communities of Color: Are we doing the right things?
First 5 Marin Children and Families Commission: Can we do more with others than we can alone? How?
IHPTP: Making Evaluation Meaningful
Horizons Foundation: More than a Perfunctory Exercise
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Oakland Kids First: How do we demonstrate our impact?
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
Oakland Department of Human Services: How can we have greater impact?
Center for Civic Partnerships: How can the sector have a greater impact?
Background: RYSE Youth Center’s mission is to build youth power and leadership towards personal and community health and transformation. RYSE represents an integrated and collaborative effort, which evolved from an extensive multi-year planning process involving numerous local and regional partners. It opened its doors in 2008 and in just over a year has grown to more than 700 members. Living its principles of collaboration and partnership, RYSE functions with a shared leadership model. Its two full-time executive directors, Kimberly Aceves and Kanwarpal Dhaliwal, attribute RYSE’s accomplishments in large part to the strength of this model.
Situation: From the beginning, these two long-time colleagues (and friends) were committed to having an evaluation frame in place prior to RYSE’s launch. In choosing jdcPartnerships, they sought “a partner that could understand a formative evaluation, someone who could work with innovation and new ideas, who understood the community, and who had the capacity to be very flexible.”
Assessment: When Kimberly and Kanwarpal contracted with jdcPartnerships in Summer 2008, RYSE was just entering stage 2 (launch & start-up) in its stage of organizational development. Their initial focus was on figuring out the balance and prioritization of evaluation levels and measures (organizational, programmatic, individual, etc.), given the multiple stakeholders engaged and invested in RYSE’s innovative model. As they both reflected: “Jara reiterated and stressed upon us: ‘You are about relationships and working across and within systems; you need to assess these relationships, and determine if and how they are effecting change.’” Together, jdcPartnerships and RYSE worked on a Theory of Change that provided a frame to evaluate the systems, collaborations and partnerships that form RYSE’s foundation as well as its impacts on the health and wellness of youth and the community. The next step was developing measurement tools, including a partner survey and a survey of youth members, and applying those findings to the evolving program model.
Interim outcomes: Asked about impact, Kimberly said: “Having the partner survey completed so early on in our development is really critical. If we hadn’t had jdcPartnerships, I don’t know if this would have happened.” Kanwarpal concurred: “This has been critical to how we’ve been able to educate the field. Considering how new we are as an organization, people are pretty blown away that we have an evaluation frame and we have a partner survey completed. It enables us as Directors to think about ‘what’s next’ in terms of work with our partners.” Just one year into the project, the partnership between RYSE and jdcPartnerships continues to evolve, as RYSE evolves. The strength of the partnership is reflected in Kimberly’s statement: “It’s a true partnership; it’s hard to know what’s theirs and what’s ours.” Kanwarpal added: “Talking about Jara and her team as ‘evaluators’ is really limited language. They are a learning partner, a thinking partner.” From jdcPartnerships’ perspective, the experience is mutual.
Theory of Change (PDF)
Findings from Partner Survey (PDF)