GETTING STARTED
Evaluating Youth Wellbeing
Program evaluation involves taking a systematic approach to asking and answering questions about a program.
YouthREX defines program evaluation as:
A systematic set of activities carried out towards understanding how, why, and to what extent a program is achieving its outcomes towards improving the wellbeing of young people.
Evaluation findings are specific to a specific group of youth experiencing a specific condition of one specific youth program over a specific time frame at a specific time.
This specificity is the main difference between evaluation and research.
Most youth programs already collect a lot of information that can be used for evaluation. YouthREX suggests that data collection for program evaluation should be incorporated in the ongoing record keeping of a youth program.
What is a Youth Program?
YouthREX broadly defines a youth program as:
Any set of organized activities that is supported by a set of resources and is focused on achieving one or more youth wellbeing outcomes.
Almost any youth program can be a candidate for program evaluation.
Why Evaluate a Youth Program?
The Ontario youth sector is committed to making a positive difference in the lives of young people. Grassroots youth programs provide young people with the skills and resources they need to overcome challenging circumstances and make positive contributions to their communities.
But grassroots youth programs sometimes struggle with how to understand and measure these outcomes and share the impacts of their programs with stakeholders – including parents/caregivers, funders, and youth themselves.
Evaluation provides youth programs with the tools to understand, measure, and track if their programs are achieving or have achieved their intended outcomes and impacts; equally important, youth programs can then understand how they are successful and how they can be improved.
Evaluation supports youth programs to do what they do, better.
A youth program that is committed to youth wellbeing is reflective, willing to improve, change, and grow, and diligently ensures that its youth participants are experiencing the outcomes that the program is working towards.
YouthREX’s Evaluation Framework for Youth Wellbeing
The Evaluation Framework for Youth Wellbeing is made up of seven connected steps within three phases that allow a grassroots youth program to tailor their evaluation to their needs. Earlier steps provide the evaluation process with the foundation for subsequent progress.
The Framework encourages a youth program to work through these steps in an iterative fashion and to proceed to the next step when the previous steps have been adequately explored.
Download the Framework from YouthREX’s Knowledge Hub.
This resource was designed to:
- Provide a framework for planning and implementing an effective program evaluation that is based on the context of grassroots youth sector programs.
- Pull together the key elements of program evaluation in one framework.
- Re-imagine the purposes and methods of program evaluation by emphasizing three lenses that are better suited to informing program evaluation within a grassroots youth sector context.