197 - The Role of Evaluation in Building a New Narrative for Achieving Equitable Outcomes for Youth

Abstract Information: We discuss how a nonprofit youth development organization is using evaluation to strengthen a new narrative for understanding and addressing inequitable education and social outcomes for underrepresented youth. The nonprofit challenges the prevailing achievement gap framing -- and academically-focused interventions and practices following from it -- as insufficient. Its new narrative foregrounds the role that developmental experiences play in student success and the lack of rich, developmental opportunities available to youth in low-income communities. While achieving traction for this new narrative through the building of robust programs and substantial financial support networks, the organization recognized that adding a well-validated measure of development as a construct and as a demonstrable outcome could amplify its story. It partnered with a university-based research and evaluation center to develop a new measurement tool that captures development as occurring in social units and in relationship-building. They used the tool to investigate the development of program participants, finding statistically significant positive, pre-post changes across multiple cycles of program delivery and across multiple sites nationwide. We share the resulting eight-dimension development construct and results of pre-post measurement of 700 program participants and give an example of how the organization is leveraging the evaluation to build further traction for the story of development by centering the eight dimensions of development in a new, brief intervention and support for under-represented students entering college.