"Moving the needle" on community-wide issues requires cross-sector coordination and an engaged community. There are countless number of community change initiatives working on a diverse as early childhood development, health care, education, poverty and homelessness, immigration and workforce development, ecological sustainability. These have been called collaborative roundtables, comprehensive community initiatives and collective impact initiatives.

The 2013 Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes workshop, hosted in Alberta, provided leaders involved with community change efforts with tools, resources and lessons learned from experience to enable them to build their capacity to evaluate the outcomes of these efforts.

Workshop Leaders Mark Cabaj and Liz Weaver have a wealth of community based experiences working with and supporting collaborative community initiatives across Canada. These leaders will share their practical experiences and the challenges they have faced in developing and measuring initiatives which have community impact.

WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS

The following presentations and resources from this event are now available:

• Module # 1 – Welcome and Opening
• Module # 2 – Understanding Community Change & Outcomes
• Module # 3 – Developing a Framework for Change
• Module # 4 – A New Orientation to Evaluation
• Module # 5 - Population Level Changes
• Module # 6 - Shared Measurement
• Module # 7 – Understanding and Measuring Policy Change
• Module # 8 - Network Mapping
• Module # 9 - Attribution and Contribution Analysis
• Module #10 - Capacity Level Changes
• Module #11 - Communicating Results

Each of these Modules has been uploaded to the Evaluation section of Resource Library on the Tamarack CCI Online Learning site at: www.tamarackcci.ca.

ADDITIONAL TAMARACK RESOURCES

In addition to the content of these modules, a number of Tamarack resources were also shared with Workshop participants.  Links for each of these resources can be found below:

• Tamarack Resource at a Glance: Most Significant Change
• Tamarack Resource at a Glance: Policy Change
• Tamarack Resource at a Glance: Framework for Change
• Tamarack Resource at a Glance: Outcomes Diary 
• Presentation on Outcome Mapping

This blog includes reflection and evaluation publications from the ECI 2013 event in Calgary, AB. These publications present participants feedback through thought provoking questions and comments. This reflection will help design, shape and implement ECI 4.

PARTICIPANT REFLECTIONS & FEEDBACK

Participant reflections, thought-provoking questions and feedback from the 2013 Evaluating Community Impact Workshop was also captured and has been shared below:

• ECI 2013 Learning Wall Comments
• ECI 2013 The Resource Wall
• ECI 2013 Participant Feedback - Themed Comments & All Data
• ECI 2013 Participant Feedback - All Data Only