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In 2014, the CNCS Office of Research & Evaluation (ORE) and AmeriCorps State and National began evaluating grantee programs that engage opportunity youth (OY) – low-income youth between the ages of 16-24, who are neither in school nor working – as AmeriCorps members. The study, independently conducted by JBS International, bundled 19 AmeriCorps programs into a single, collaboratively designed impact evaluation. Since smaller organizations and nonprofits often lack the resources, sample sizes, and expertise to conduct rigorous evaluations, “bundling” smaller programs together into a single evaluation can help programs attain higher levels of evaluative evidence, more effectively use evaluation resources, promote organizational learning, and build evaluation capacity.
The goal of this bundled evaluation was to assess whether OY who participated in AmeriCorps showed greater improvements in education, employment, and civic engagement outcomes than comparison youth. The webinar presentation drew on lessons learned from this approach – welcoming more than 200 participants – and explored how grant-making organizations can determine if a “bundled” evaluation approach is right for them. Check back in a few weeks to access the webinar materials, and findings from the report are available now.
ORE wants to know how we can help make research meaningful and useful not only for researchers, but also local communities. Our new research grant competition focuses on engaging communities in conversations about their civic health using participatory research approaches to boost civic engagement and strengthen community capacity to address local issues, both of which are central to CNCS’s mission. We are now seeking applications from institutions of higher education to support academics and applied researchers who work with and in local communities to:
- Actively engage residents and other local stakeholders in a research process,
- Identify a local issue of concern to the community,
- Understand what may facilitate or hinder participation to address the issue, and
- Create a collaborative action plan to increase civic engagement and build relationships to tackle the community-identified issue.
CNCS seeks to support participatory research in three types of communities, with equal priority: communities that are already working collaboratively to tackle a locally identified issue, communities that have experienced a disaster, and communities in social crisis.
The application is due April 10, 2018, 5 p.m. ET. For more information, click here. Questions about the grant and application process can
be sent to NationalServiceResearch@cns.gov.
Check out some of the new resources added to the Evidence
Exchange since our last quarterly newsletter:
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