East Side Aligned

Out of School Time System Evaluation

East Side Aligned logo

Project Date
Sep 2017 – Jun 2021

Type of Evaluation
Process

Setting
Community-based

Overview

East Side Aligned is a collective impact movement within the greater East St. Louis area working to ensure all children and youth are healthy, safe, and secure, ready to learn and work, and empowered to create change.

East Side Aligned supports the Greater East St. Louis Youth Coordinating Council, an out-of-school time network that works to ensure youth have access to high-quality afterschool and summer opportunities.

The Evaluation Center partnered with East Side Aligned to build and implement a network-level evaluation for the Youth Coordinating Council, including the development of key evaluation questions.

Project Description

Background

The Greater East St. Louis Youth Coordinating Council (YCC) is made up of out-of-school time providers and is an anchor coalition of the East Side Aligned movement, a collective impact movement to improve outcomes for young people by aligning policies, practices, and resources across sectors. YCC has implemented continuous improvement practices across partner organizations, established a data sharing agreement with the local school district, and identified desired outcomes for the network over the past three years.

YCC seeks to demonstrate the impact of network activities, improve network capability for data-informed decision-making, and support providers’ program quality and evaluation capacity. The evaluation team worked closely with YCC and partners to develop a network-level evaluation plan, which incorporated system, program, and youth-level outcomes to ensure all aspects of the out-of-school time system were captured in the evaluation. Existing student and program quality data across providers were aggregated to show network-level impact. New data collection tools and systems were developed as necessary to answer identified evaluation questions. The evaluation team worked with each partner organization to develop organizational logic models and provide technical assistance, as needed.

Evaluation Center Activities

  • Conducted organization-level logic model workshops with YCC partner organizations.
  • Provided evaluation-related technical assistance to YCC partner organizations to examine progress on program objectives and goals.
  • Conducted network-level logic model workshop with YCC.
  • Developed network-level key evaluation questions.
  • Identified and/or developed an appropriate evaluation database to manage and track data.
  • Supported providers’ collection of student and program-level data to answer network-level evaluation questions.
  • Developed data collections tools as needed to support network-level evaluation.

Our Products

  • Provider-level logic models
  • Network-level evaluation plan, including logic model and evaluation methods matrix
  • Monthly progress updates
  • Data collection tools, systems, and protocols
  • Data management system
  • Training-related materials
  • Monthly progress updates
  • Final evaluation report and other dissemination products

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