Systems in Evaluation
Loraine Park, MSW
Director, Learning & Evaluation
ECMC Foundation, United States
Bethany Miller, MA
Director, Learning & Impact
Ascendium Education Philanthropy, United States
Location: White River Ballroom G
Abstract Information: In recent years, many funders, nonprofits, and organizations in the social service sector have made an explicit commitment to fundamentally change our systems so that they consistently produce equitable outcomes. This has challenged the evaluation community to think beyond the traditional methods, metrics, and measures that have previously served us well. While there is a small but growing body of frameworks that aim to articulate what systems change work looks like including but not limited to Kania, Kramer, and Senge’s The Water of Systems Change and Meadow’s Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, fewer organizations in the social services sector have articulated how they are evaluating their systems change efforts. Join in this interactive roundtable conversation with learning and evaluation leads from two postsecondary funders who will share their organization’s commitment to systems change and their journey to date in evaluating those efforts. In addition to hearing briefly from these funders about their systems change evaluation efforts to date, they will facilitate a conversation about questions that they are grappling with.
Relevance Statement: In recent years, many funders, nonprofits, and organizations in the social service sector have made an explicit commitment to fundamentally change our systems so that they consistently produce equitable outcomes. This has challenged the evaluation community to think beyond the traditional methods, metrics, and measures that have previously served us well. While there is a small but growing body of frameworks that aim to articulate what systems change work looks like including but not limited to Kania, Kramer, and Senge’s The Water of Systems Change and Meadow’s Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, fewer organizations in the social services sector have articulated how they are evaluating their systems change efforts. Join in this interactive roundtable conversation with learning and evaluation leads from two postsecondary funders who will share their organization’s commitment to systems change and their journey to date in evaluating those efforts. In addition to hearing briefly from these three funders about their systems change evaluation efforts to date, they will facilitate a conversation on: • How do you understand the collective contribution of different efforts aligned towards a common set of broad system change goals? • What’s the role of examining individual-level outcomes when evaluating systems change? • What are appropriate and inappropriate uses of national trends (e.g., changes in national estimates of graduation rates) when trying to understand a system? • How do you measure progress when systems change efforts are take longer time horizons?