About this Toolkit

GETTING STARTED

This Evaluation Toolkit is designed to support the work of grassroots youth programs – especially those with limited resources for evaluation.

The Toolkit will lead you through each phase of the evaluation process, with action steps, guiding questions, and links to online resources for learning more about evaluation – supporting your program to develop an evaluation plan, implement it, and use the findings to strengthen your program and promote the wellbeing of your youth participants.

Why was the Toolkit created?

Grassroots youth programs need to be evaluated. But program staff sometimes struggle with how to understand and measure outcomes and share the impacts of programs to stakeholders – including parents/caregivers, funders, and youth themselves.

Program staff may have several questions about how to proceed, such as:

How do we know what our capacity is to undertake a program evaluation?
What do we want to learn from our program evaluation?
How do we ensure our evaluation captures the rich stories about the work we do with youth?
How can we involve our youth stakeholders?
How should we use and report our findings?

The Toolkit provides you with resources that can support addressing different questions and issues that arise in five important areas:

Setting the stage for purposeful evaluation by understanding your capacity to undertake an evaluation journey.
Developing a better understanding of your program using a program logic model.
Evaluating the implementation (process evaluation) of your program to document what you are doing.
Evaluating outcomes (outcome evaluation) to show how your program is making a difference.
Learning from your evaluation findings and taking action to strengthen your program and improve youth wellbeing.

Although the primary audience for this Toolkit is grassroots youth programs in Ontario, this Toolkit will also be useful to anyone interested in understanding the outcomes of their work with program participants.

Who created the Toolkit?

This Evaluation Toolkit was developed by Youth Research and Evaluation eXchange (YouthREX), a provincial project based at the School of Social Work York at York University, primarily funded by the Ontario Ministry of Children, Community & Social Services with contributions from the York Research Chair in Youth and Contexts of Inequity held by Dr. Uzo Anucha at the School of Social Work, York University.

YouthREX promotes the integration of evidence and evaluation in the development and delivery of Ontario’s youth programs.

YouthREX’s vision is an Ontario where shared knowledge is transformed into positive impact for all youth. Our mission is to make research evidence and evaluation accessible and relevant to Ontario’s youth sector through knowledge exchange, capacity building, and evaluation leadership.

GETTING STARTED