TwoHelp Atlanta

better late than never…

July 3, 2006 on 2:32 am | In Uncategorized |

so this is much delayed, but now that school is finally over (and i have my degree from ha-vahd and a couple of unemployed moments (months?!) to breathe) i thought i would complete this site with an update/summary on my project in atlanta.

so where did i leave off? after the weekend exploring atlanta, things got busy. we spent every day at the CDC office, learning more about the environmental health programs that we were there to create an evaluation for and working on our project plan. it was daunting at first - how could we create one evaluation plan for fourteen disparate programs? the programs varied from rat control in the republic of palau to emissions control in boston to an asthma program for the city of milwaukee.

our first major task was to create a logic model to better understand the process, outcomes, and objectives of the individual projects and the CDC’s environmental health capacity building program overall. we ploughed through their individual files, initial grant application, program goals, annual reports, and tried to unearth the common themes. this is what we came up with:

Environmental Health Logic Model

the logic model was an extremely helpful way for us to visualize and understand how our inputs, projects, and outcomes fit together to achieve the final goals fo the program. it also allowed us to understand what indicators we could pull from this program to effectively evaluate its impact(s) on improving health outcomes and increasing environmental health capacity. we used this as the basis for further discussions with the CDC team to create an evaluation framework that was both feasible and informative.

we spent quite a bit more time with the progam manager discussing just what capacity building means and how it was generally understood within the scope of this project. we agreed that for this project, it meant enhancing the ability of people to improve environmental health outcomes. from there, our next task was to develop indicators that we could use to measure how the program was doing.  this was challenging, as the first instinct is to throw onto paper anything that could be measured.