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.

Sunday was a bit more interesting. I went to the new Georgia Aquarium, the world’s largest aquarium. It opened in November 2005. There I discovered where all the children in the city were. But once I maneuvered my way around all of the strollers it was fabulous. The stars were two young whale sharks, Ralph and Norton.

They were amazing. I’d heard about whale sharks while learning to dive in Thailand, but at the time I was secretly happy that I didn’t see any because they were so big and frankly, I was a bit uncertain about how I would react to one while I was 40 ft underwater for the first time. But now, despite their size (an adult male can grow up to 60 ft. long), I’d really like to see one in the open water! The other bit surprise was the leafy sea dragon… I have never seen anything like it before, nor did I know anything like it even existed. It was like one of the crazy, wonderful, quirky creatures out of “Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” So the good news is, there is one good thing in Atlanta - and all of the local three year olds are in the know. As long as there’s adequate parking for their strollers.

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!

Stay tuned for more…

alexis