TwoHelp Atlanta

At the CDC…

January 6, 2006 on 11:04 am | In Uncategorized |

I have been at the CDC Program Evaluation training course for three days and know a lot more about how to evaluate programs - in general. The challenge now is to take the theoretical knowledge that I have gained in these sessions and apply them to a real, on-going program. This “real” experience, I have discovered, is a rare opportunity in academia and I am eager for the challenge.

I am working with another HSPH student, and together, we will be evaluating a capacity building program within the CDC Environmental Health Services Bureau (EHSB). This program actually consists of 14 sub-projects (grantees of the larger CDC project), 9 state and local health departments and 5 universities. The goal of each project is to simultaneously increase capacity and improve health outcomes. Our goal is to create a framework to determine how well each project and the overall program are meeting these two goals.

We have spent a lot of our initial meetings discussing how we define capacity building. This is a popular buzzword, with a fairly nebulous meaning. It is used differently in different settings, though is often understood to mean organizational capacity building - or the ability for an organization to accomplish something. As this specific capacity building program within the EHSB has been passed down from one program manager to another, the original intent has shifted somewhat. As such, the definition for capacity building that we have settled on for our evaluation is the ability to implement an effective environmental health program.

The next step will be to create a logic model that includes the inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts of the program.  More details on this as it becomes a reality!