Organizational Learning & Evaluation Capacity Building
Tanha Patel, MPH (she/her/hers)
Senior Technical Advisor
CDC Foundation, North Carolina, United States
Tanha Patel, MPH (she/her/hers)
Senior Technical Advisor
CDC Foundation, North Carolina, United States
Sarah Myer, MPH, MCHES
Senior Evaluator
Cultivate Capacity LLC, United States
Sarah Myer, MPH, MCHES
Senior Evaluator
Cultivate Capacity LLC, United States
Location: White River Ballroom E
Abstract Information: Evaluators are often brought on to evaluate a portion of a program or project, as opposed to being engaged throughout the program lifecycle. From experience, this is true even if you are an internal evaluator. Internal evaluators, especially those in small evaluation teams, are stretched thin with evaluating multiple programs at a time. External evaluators, on the other hand are restricted based on their scope of work and funding available to truly engage them in a comprehensive evaluation. This creates a void that evaluators often fill in by building evaluative thinking capacity among program teams. This Birds of Feather session will focus on understanding how evaluators are building evaluation capacity, skills and resources they need, and best practices and lessons learned when creating a culture of learning. This Birds of Feathers session will share experiences with cultivating capacity for evaluation among non-evaluator partners. The facilitators for the session will engage participants in discussions around questions such as: • What skills and resources are needed by evaluators to support them in creating a culture of learning and building evaluation capacity within their teams? • Who are the key partners who need to be engaged in evaluation and hence evaluation capacity building? • What strategies and approaches have been successful in building evaluation capacity? • What strategies and approaches have been successful in creating a culture of learning? • How best can we tell the story of how we are building evaluation capacity through all our work?
Relevance Statement: As internal evaluators and now external evaluators, we have had to build evaluation capacity among our program teams. We saw how impactful this capacity building is in gaining buy-in from our program team members, ensuring utilization of evaluation findings for program refinement, and creating a culture for continuous learning. We have worked on evaluation teams and projects that had limited resources. This made it even more important for us to cultivate capacity for evaluation that can be sustained beyond our engagement. Like many of our fellow evaluators, we were not trained in capacity building. We learned on the job and adapted our strategies to meet the learning needs of the programs and team members. This Birds of Feather session will focus on understanding how evaluators are building evaluation capacity, skills and resources they need, and best practices and lessons learned when creating a culture of learning. The information gathered from this session will be valuable in developing resources to support evaluators as they continue to cultivate capacity building within their organizations. Furthermore, this session will create a venue for fellow evaluators to come together and build a community of practice around evaluation capacity building. Informally, the dialogue from this session will allow us to share our stories and document the important role evaluators are playing in building organizational capacity and creating a culture of learning that will be sustained even after a particular evaluation project is completed. The impact of this work is immense.