The Politics of Evidence: The Youthrex Model for Supporting Youth Sector Organizations with Program Evaluation

Program evaluation can support youth programs to be reflective, improve, change and grow to ensure that youth participants are experiencing the outcomes that their programs are working towards. Despite these benefits, many grassroots youth organizations frequently struggle with evaluation and ask questions such as: How can evaluation improve our practice rather than get in the way of it? What do we need to evaluate given the tension between what funders want measured and we are interested in knowing? How do we evaluate and what does our evaluation mean? How can we change based on what we learned? Responses to these questions often fall along a continuum – at one end evaluation is seen as apolitical and value-free and at the other end evaluation is seen as so fraught with contradictions that it is meaningless and needs to be avoided. Given these polarizing views of evaluation, it is not surprising that youth workers frequently complain that evaluation is a deterrent to doing what they are passionate about – working one-on-one with youth! To support the evaluation capacity of grassroots youth organizations in Ontario, the Ontario Ministry of Child and Youth Services invested in the creation of the Youth Research and Evaluation eXchange (YouthREX), a province-wide initiative based at the School of Social Work at York University with five Regional Hubs based in four other universities across Ontario. YouthREX's mission is to make research evidence and evaluation practices accessible and relevant to Ontario's grassroots youth sector through knowledge mobilization, capacity building and evaluation leadership. Our workshop will describe YouthREX's collaborative approach to program evaluation within a youth sector context. Central to YouthREX's approach is a nuanced understanding of ‘evidence' that acknowledges the politics of evaluation and the need for evaluation processes and methods to reflect grassroots youth sector realities. In this workshop, we will share our evaluation framework that we developed specifically for youth programs. We will discuss the purpose, vision and principles of this evaluation framework and examine its three guiding lenses: learning-focused, youth engagement, and contextualized methods. We will discuss how these lenses are uniquely suited to respond to the organizational, social and political realities of grassroots youth programs. We will explore how a broadened definition of evidence and evaluation can provide opportunities for learning and taking action that improves youth wellbeing. From our service pledge, to our “discovery meetings”, to the development and implementation of an evaluation service plan, we review how our Customized Evaluation Supports (CES) support youth programs to better understand their program theory and intended outcomes so they can develop and implement evaluation plans that track, measure and share the impact of their work with youth. Using a CES case example, we will walk through how to select outcomes, indicators and measures and share how our online evaluation resources, part of our recently launched online eXchange for Youth Work, can build the capacity of youth programs to undertake evaluations that improve youth wellbeing.