Planning and Evaluation Resource Center (PERC)

Youth development practice is dynamic; as professionals and volunteers, activists and organizers do the work, they learn, and what they learn can change the practice and the policy of youth development. For this reason, the Innovation Center for Community and Youth Development (Innovation Center), with its partners at the Tufts University Applied Developmental Science Institute (ADSI), has created the Planning and Evaluation Resource Center (PERC). PERC brings together the current best practices in youth program development and facilitates access to the best resources for communities to conduct, evaluate, and sustain youth programs that work.

PERC's design is based on a true partnership between research and practice, and in the process, it strengthens both. Participants in the 2002 Wingspread Conference on youth involvement in community evaluation argued that these types of researcher-practitioner partnerships are most beneficial for the work of youth development (Wingspread Symposium, 2002). PERC partners adhered to this value in researching, creating, and disseminating information to support planning and evaluation efforts.

In 2001, the Innovation Center undertook an intensive study of the needs of community-based youth development workers within the Cooperative Extension Service, as well as civic-engagement-based youth development organizations. The aim was involved with the Innovation Center's Youth Leadership for Development Initiative and sought to uncover these youth development organizations' ideas for tools and strategies to strengthen their work (Innovation Center, 2001a). At the same time, the Innovation Center commissioned a report by Dewey & Kaye, Inc. (2001), which asked similar questions in a survey of 29 youth-serving organizations in southwest Pennsylvania. These compiled findings indicated that youth development practitioners saw a great need for more user-friendly tools to focus on program improvement and for partnerships with academics and experts who can validate knowledge developed locally. The results dovetailed with findings uncovered by ADSI through more than 100 interviews with researchers, policymakers, and funders, suggesting that accessible evaluation efforts from a centralized source might support evaluation efforts on a community level (Lerner, 2001). To meet these needs and thereby strengthen youth development work, PERC was created as a source of information, training, technical assistance, and powerful connections for community youth development organizations and applied developmental scientists.

PERC facilitates, through the Innovation Center, a full range of training, technical assistance, gatherings, and partnerships. The training, tool kits, and technical assistance target three areas: evaluation for youth development/civic engagement programs, evaluation and information management, and youth-adult partnerships in evaluation. Trainers collaborate with community partners to focus on empowering individuals and groups, through a train-the-trainer approach, to implement their own planning and evaluation processes in their communities and organizations.

To support the technical assistance available through the trainings, the Innovation Center has led efforts to create three practitioner tool kits. These distinctly different yet mutually supportive curricula provide practical activities and tools to help organizations measure program impact and improve opportunities for youth. Evaluating Civic Activism: A Curriculum for Community and Youth-Serving Organizations (Innovation Center, 2004a) is based on 5 years of work with 12 community-based youth activism programs in the United States. Written by Social Policy Research Associates under the direction of the Innovation Center, it helps groups assess their organizational needs for evaluation, design evaluations to fit their organizational goals, and use evaluation data to report to funders and other stakeholders. Measuring Incremental Change: Getting to Objectives and Outcomes That Make Sense for Youth Work (Innovation Center, 2004b) is written by the New England Network for Child, Youth, and Family Services with the Innovation Center, with the aim of helping child and youth service agencies to coordinate and manage information systems and streamline reporting and tracking functions for multiple funding audiences and stakeholders. Reflect and Improve: Practical Tools for Engaging Youth and Adults as Partners in Evaluation of Community Building (Innovation Center, 2004c), a partnership between the University of Kentucky and the Innovation Center, provides youth and adults with practical activities and tools to evaluate their community building work together. It is designed to complement the Innovation Center's Building Community: A[Page 840]Tool Kit for Youth and Adults in Charting Assets and Creating Change (Innovation Center, 2001a).

...