Don’t Just Look Back: Using Evaluation to Inform Future planning
March 7th, 2022
In 2014, Rose Community Foundation and Jim Joseph Foundation partnered to create the Denver and Boulder Jewish Teen Education and Engagement Initiative, one of 10 community-based efforts across the country in the Teen Funder Collaborative (now housed at The Jewish Federations of North America). Our initiative, like others, was designed to cultivate new Jewish teen offerings, increase teen engagement and involve teens who come from diverse Jewish backgrounds.
Each initiative had a critical component in parallel to these external efforts: independent evaluation. Over the course of the initiative, our evaluator, Informing Change, provided us with findings, data and analyses showing progress toward our desirable outcomes. And, if we weren’t making progress, we gained an understanding of the reasons why. The final report, based on seven years of data collection and evaluation, is a valuable knowledge-base for professionals and institutions — both locally and nationally — seeking to engage Jewish teens and their families.
Beyond looking back at the initiative’s outcomes, we plan to utilize the data from this report to inform a variety of approaches moving forward — from considering potential investments in teen engagement, elevating the needs of Jewish-teen-serving professionals, cultivating collaboration and developing a cohesive community vision around teen programming. To that end, our organization has identified key takeaways where the collected data can meaningfully inform our future investments in the Jewish community.
Vanessa Bernier (she/her/hers) is program officer, Jewish life, at Rose Community Foundation.