Internal Evaluation
Linda Lee, PhD (she/her/hers)
Learning and Evaluation Administrator
Reach Out, United States
Desiree Greenhouse, n/a
Evaluation Associate
Reach Out, United States
Marc Salazar, n/a
Evaluation Specialist
Reach Out, United States
Location: Grand Ballroom 9
This session will present three parallel activities that an internal evaluation team at a nonprofit organization is implementing to build evaluation capacity. These activities are focused on three groups: the organization’s leadership team, staff, and the internal evaluation team itself. For the organizational leadership team, the internal evaluation team provides training and support to develop and use theories of change, which helps to capture and clearly communicate the story of change that each program is expecting and experiencing. At the staff level, the evaluation team implements a program to develop staff champions for learning and evaluation; the champions develop and implement staff-driven learning agendas which helps to look deeper into the programs, the contexts, and the experiences of community members. Internally, the evaluation team is focusing their capacity building on equity in evaluations, with emphasis on understanding and incorporating the unique contexts and stories of evaluation stakeholders. Discussion in this session will focus on the role that internal evaluators can play in building organizational capacity for telling stories from data.