Heartland Center Staff Continues Program Evaluation Focus

If you see Heartland Center staff in airports in Ohio, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, New Mexico or Colorado this summer, you can ask them about their evaluation tasks! Currently serving as evaluators and coaches for community teams participating in the MIRA Initiative of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, our staff members are visiting communities as well as staying in touch by phone and E-mail.

In this national evaluation effort for the Foundation, the Heartland Center has been coaching and monitoring each site, made up of a cluster of community teams that complete a training program and then develop team projects. While this is actually the second round of the MIRA effort, staff also revisited the sites in six states which participated in the program last year.

The Heartland Center has provided external evaluation services in a wide variety of settings over the years, including foundation-funded projects, federal programs and community leadership projects. According to Program Associate Jim Sanks, it´s the combination of methods that keeps evaluation work interesting. "I like combining quantitative methods with qualitative methods. For instance, doing some survey work plus some focus groups or interviews. That´s fun to design and enhances the validity of the results," Jim adds.

And it´s the design phase of the evaluation that always gains the most interest from staff. "We participated in a team of consultants and helped to create a measurement tool for community development for the Forest Service," says Co-Director Milan Wall. Several staff will work on an evaluation for the Kansas Center for Rural Initiatives as part of a recently funded three-year project.

If you´d like information about our evaluation services, please call staff at the Heartland Center. We´re interested in developing evaluation efforts that help local communities learn from and improve community projects.