Leveraging Program Evaluation for Cross-Organizational Collaboration and Decision-Making

In this session, we present our engagement with project partners to share leadership and decision-making responsibilities in a NASA-funded project serving neurodivergent students. Our team facilitated opportunities for collaboration between partners, leading to more efficient, equitable, and transparent decision-making. This created an environment where project leadership was shared among all partners to create a community-centered approach to improving project outcomes. We developed a debrief form and process to utilize evaluation findings to make impactful program changes. Throughout this process we were able to highlight the value of program evaluators as a key partner by: – Facilitating dialogue between program partners – Building capacity and trust in program partners to have focused conversations – Providing data in a format that empowers program partners to make informed decisions – Documenting decision-making for transparent communication and reporting This session will interest evaluators working on projects with shared leadership and cross-organizational partners.
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Rasha Elsayed – Research Associate II, Science and Engineering, WestEd; Karen Melchior – Research Associate II, WestEd; Kimberly Nguyen – Research Associate II, WestEd; Joshua Valcarcel – Senior Research Associate, WestEd, Andrew Grillo-Hill