About the workshop: How can we support organizations to embed evaluative practices within their day-to-day operations? This webinar focuses on strategies to facilitate the adoption of these practices through the principles of Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB) and Evaluative Thinking (ET). ECB provides evaluators with a model to incorporate evaluation routinely in the life of an organization and ET pushes organizations to adopt reflective and critical thinking on how their programs operate.

At the end of the webinar participants should be able to:

1 – Define ECB and ET

2 – Understand the ECB model

3 – Apply ET within their own practices in the community

4 – Understand the strengths and challenges of ECB and ET

Presenter bios:

Jennifer Rae (she/her) has over 10 years of experience conducting Program Evaluation in a range of contexts and settings. She currently works as a Research Associate at the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation, a Canadian non-profit research organization. She also teaches Program Evaluation part-time at the University of Ottawa. Jennifer holds a PhD in Psychology with a special focus on applied, community-based research and evaluation

John Ecker (he/him) is a Research Manager with Dr. Stephen Hwang’s team at MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and is also a Senior Researcher at the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. He holds a PhD in Psychology with a focus on community-based research and evaluation. Over the past 10 years, he has worked with a number of different organizations in the housing and homelessness to support their research and evaluation activities. His primary research interests include Housing First, community integration, and supports for the 2SLGBTQ+ community.

About the MAP Evaluation Series: The MAP Evaluation Series aims to build on our core principles – street-level solutions, policy impact, training and community partnership – to build evaluation capacity. We convene community agencies and researchers around the country interested in learning about different evaluation and developing evaluation skills.

All sessions are facilitated by individuals with academic and applied evaluation expertise, and are available free-of-charge via Zoom.

About MAP: Through big-picture research and street-level solutions, MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions tackles complex urban health issues. With an evolving focus on evidence-based solutions, the need for evaluation expertise is growing. Connected to both a teaching hospital and university, MAP has a longstanding history in training. We partner with individuals in the community, community agencies and all levels of government to study scalable solutions that will have real, long-term, positive health impacts. Visit maphealth.ca, twitter @MAP_Health.

If you'd like to learn about future MAP Evaluation Series workshops, please join our mailing list by writing to alix.freiler @ unityhealth.to.