The Community Environmental Sustainability (CES) hub at Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) works towards facilitating community-campus partnerships to increase environmental sustainability. The CES hub functions at the local level in three key communities across Ontario: Ottawa, Peterborough and Haliburton.

Brianna Salmon, newly appointed executive director at GreenUP, helps facilitate those partnerships to increase environmental sustainability in Peterborough, Ont.

Previously GreenUP’s manager of the transportation department, Brianna says she was drawn to GreenUP because of its commitment to environmental sustainability.

“The work that GreenUP and organizations like GreenUP do is really vital, both in terms of direct program implementation and partner facilitation, but also being an advocacy voice for progressive policies and plans within all levels of government,” she says.

That’s what drew her to this kind of work and she says it’s been hugely humbling.

“I was interested in finding an organization where I could engage in really grounded, vocal work and I think that’s been something’s that’s felt very meaningful to me.”

CFICE and GreenUP partner with Trent Community Research Centre and Trent University to facilitate community-campus partnerships, allowing students and academics the opportunity to partner with the community and work together towards environmental sustainability.

Brianna Salmon is GreenUP’s Executive Director and a community partner with the CES hub. ©the Peterborough Examiner

“As an organization, we welcome hundreds of students to projects but it can often be challenging for us as an organization to manage. We have limited capacity and a lot of our programs and staff are grant funded so they have specific restrictions and things they should be focusing on,” she says.��“We recognize it’s very valuable but often facilitating student research isn’t one of those things.”

Brianna says she was drawn to the CFICE project to help facilitate those partnership opportunities.

“I was really interested in looking at how we can support the capacity of community partners, like us, in actually engaging in student research.”

Brianna says GreenUP’s partnership with CFICE has been very meaningful.

“CFICE has meant to me and my organization the opportunity to engage really deliberately and in a way that is more transparent with our academic partners to make sure that our partnerships are as sustainable and impactful as possible,” she says.

But measuring that impact can sometimes be hard due to lack of funding for evaluation.

“Doing a robust evaluation program is something you don’t often get funded for in the non-profit sector and it can be a bit of a gap from my perspective,” she says.

“Often what tends to happen is that we move from project to project really not being able to do much meaningful evaluation.”

Without evaluation, Brianna says, it’s hard to understand what the long-term impact is of GreenUP’s community interventions.

“That was one of the reasons we were really interested in engaging in the CFICE project – to really try and increase our capacity to reflect critically on the kinds of activities that we undertake. Also making sure that we are being able to address some of the environmental challenges that GreenUP seeks to program around in a way that’s really strategic and thoughtful,” she says.

The partnerships are important to get everyone working towards the common goal of environmental sustainability.

“Making sure that the health of our environment remains a priority is everybody’s responsibility,” Brianna says.

“Our livelihoods and human health are contingent upon it.”

Please visit for more information.

Please browse the�� to learn more about the workshop and how you can become a member of our learning community from from February 23-25 in Toronto, Ontario.

This workshop is best suited to those who have an interest and some basic experience with evaluation but are eager to tackle the challenging but critical task of getting feedback on local efforts to change communities. As a participant of Evaluating Community Impact, you will have the opportunity to:

• Identify the dynamics and patterns of community change;
• Strengthen your understanding and appetite for evaluation; and
• Explore a variety of evaluation approaches and tools appropriate for community change.

Special rates are available for teams registering three or more people.�� today to secure your spot at the 2015 Evaluating Community Impact Workshop!��Registration will be limited to the first 150 people who sign up.

On May 23rd, 2014 RDI will present Mark Cabaj, the President of the consulting company From Here to There and an Associate of Tamarack – An Institute for Community Engagement, via webinar. Mark’s current focus is on developing practical ways to understand, plan and evaluate efforts to address complex community issues (e.g. neighbourhood renewal, poverty and homelessness, community safety, educational achievement and health). Mark served briefly as the Executive Director of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) in 2001. He was the coordinator of the Waterloo region’s Opportunities 2000 Project (1997-2000), an initiative that won provincial, national and international awards for its multi-sector approach to poverty reduction. Mark lives in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) with his wife Leann and their children Isaiah and Zoë.

Audience:
Municipal Managers, Community Economic Development Officers, Local Leaders, Development Practitioners, Municipality Staffs and Managemnt, Students and Faculties, and everyone interested in Community Engagemnt and Collective Impact.

When: Friday, May 23, 2014 (please RSVP by May 22, 2014)
Time: 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. (CST)
For more information or to register contact Rural Development Institute at:
adedirany@brandonu.ca
204-571-8585 / 800-571-8585
www.brandonu.ca/rdi

• Rigour and the Multiple levels of quantitative and qualitative analysis
• Rigour in methods and post-positivist paradigm shifting, and evaluation and
• Rigour in defining theory of change

Please view the full article��here.

This June 2-4 the will host Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes, a multi-day interactive workshop in Halifax, NS, designed specifically for leaders who have basic evaluation training and a desire to take their community change efforts to the next level. This dynamic learning experience will be led by Liz Weaver, Vice-President of the Tamarack Institute and Mark Cabaj, President of Here to There Consulting, who together possess a wealth of hands-on experience working with and supporting collaborative, community change initiatives across North America.

Participants of the workshop will gain a deep understanding and appreciation of the dynamic nature of community change. Key themes addressed in the workshop will include:

• Models and dynamics of community change including Theory of Change

• The core concepts of evaluative thinking, utilization focused evaluation, and developmental evaluation
• The critical differences between traditional program evaluation and the evaluation of community change evaluation
• The unique��challenges of assessing community change e.g. ‘measuring’ systems change, dealing with unanticipated outcomes, attributing outcomes to change activities, and participatory sense-making
• Evaluation Planning Tools e.g. evaluation scope of work, utilization-focused checklist, developmental evaluation checklist
• Outcome Evaluation Tools e.g. Most Significant Change, contribution analysis, multiple perspectives exercise, outcome mapping, splash and rippleSubsidies are available for colleagues who enroll together. To learn more or register your team for this workshop, please visit the Evaluating Community Impact website at .

  Questions? Please contact: Kirsti@tamarackcommunity.ca.

One of the “gaps” the community wanted to address is how to work on the��so-called “attribution problem” without using the randomized control trial typical of Duflo’s experimental approach to impact evaluation (due to the ethical and practical problems of control trials).��Chevalier and Buckles��developed an alternative approach to counterfactual thinking that draws on the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition instead. While still a work in progress, they think it is promising. The report also shows how participatory approaches to evaluation can be integrated into Results Based Measurement, and reflects on various “hybrid” models that bridge gaps in conventional methods.

A with stories of innovation in evaluation methods by the various organizations is now available on the Participatory Action Research, Planning and Evaluation Website.

Cousins, Bradley J., Whitmore. Elizabeth, Shulha, Lyn. American Journal of Evaluation March 2013 34: 7-22