Organizations we Partner with
Ontario Brain Institute
http://www.braininstitute.ca/evaluation-support-program
We have collaborated with the Ontario Brain Institute (OBI) to develop a program of work around building capacities in community organizations that focus on enhancing brain health in Ontario. Our initial focus was on enhancing capacities of organizations. We have completed a forum of papers with colleagues at OBI, and leaders in evaluation capacity building, on how evaluation capacity building can be done at the system level. This forum will soon be published in the journal, Evaluation and Program Planning.
Margaret’s Housing and Community Support Services
As part of Ontario’s Poverty Reduction Strategy, we are presently evaluating the impacts of drop-in services on a range of social, health and economic outcomes. We are especially interested in how drop-ins occupy a special place in the ecology of care of individuals who face multiple synergies of epidemics (syndemics). Our work focus is on strategic, collaborative approaches to address such syndemic conditions.
Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office (TNO)
We currently are partnering with TNO to evaluate their entrepreneurial initiative, Community Enterprise Resource Centre (CERC), offering one-to-one support to individuals in home-based businesses, training, resources, and links to markets beyond the immediate community to improve capacities and income of women and families. Additionally one of the features of our work with TNO is a longitudinal evaluation of how recently immigrated Syrian newcomers experience the landscape of services and how their own perceptions of the landscape of services change over time.
Dancing with Parkinson’s
http://www.dancingwithparkinsons.com/
Dancing with Parkinson’s is a ground-breaking dance program for individuals living with Parkinson’s disease and currently offers the program weekly at nine locations in the Greater Toronto Area. Our partnership explores how innovative realist impact evaluation approaches can be implemented to explore the impact of dance on the lives of people with Parkinson’s disease. Even though the initial project formally ended more than a year ago, our collaboration with Dancing with Parkinson’s continues to the present. We are currently collaborating to develop a follow-up evaluation design to expand our learnings from the initial evaluation.
Toronto Central Community Care Access Centre (TOCCAC)
http://healthcareathome.ca/torontocentral/en
We conducted a longitudinal evaluation that integrated advanced quantitative and qualitative methods to estimate the impacts of the TOCCAC’s Integrated Care for Complex Populations (ICCP) project. Strong favorable outcomes on the impact of integrated care were obtained. We are in the process of publishing papers and discussing the learnings from this project.
China National Health Development Research Centre (CNHDRC) http://www.nhei.cn/nhei_en/center_en/web/index.jsp
CNHDRC has been one of our closest partners over the past five years. We have worked both on building evaluation capacities in the health system as well as building capacities to demand evidence for addressing health inequities in China. An important set of papers with our key partner at CNHDRC, Kun Zhao as the co-editor, is upcoming in the New Directions for Evaluation volume published by the American Evaluation Association.
The Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) http://www.flacsochile.org/
Through teaching and research in the social sciences, FLACSO aims to promote economic development and reduce inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. We have worked closely with Orielle Solar from FLACSO in Chile to implement theory-driven evaluations for multiple projects including evaluations of informal workers. Orielle also has contributed to the New Directions for Evaluation volume on building evaluation capacities to address inequities, along with our Chinese and Indian colleagues.
Centre for Health and Social Justice (CHSJ)
CHSJ is a civil society institution based in New Delhi, India that works on issues of men, masculinity and gender, health rights of marginalized communities and reproductive and sexual health. The director of CHSJ, Abhijit Das is one of our closest collaborators. We recently evaluated a program implemented by CHSJ on engaging with men to reduce domestic violence in a hundred villages in the Indian state of Maharashtra. Abhijit has also contributed to the upcoming New Directions for Evaluation volume on building evaluation capacities to address inequities.
People’s Uni
People’s Uni is an open-access education initiative focused on building public health capacities in developing countries using internet based e-learning. People’s Uni offers certificates, diplomas and a Master’s of public health. Over the last seven years, evaluators from the Centre have worked closely with Dick Heller, the founder of People’s Uni, to deliver online courses on evaluation for more than three hundred students. The Evaluation Centre is presently conducting an evaluation of People’s Uni.
N’Mninoeyaa Aboriginal Health Access Centre
In partnership with the Health Access Centre we worked on their disabilities project with seven First Nation communities between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie to determine the effectiveness of community engagement strategies to ensure appropriate individuals in the community and external to the community were being engaged around disabilities. Even though the project is formally over, engagement with N’Mninoeyaa continues around evaluation methods that are appropriate in First Nation communities.
Three to Be
We worked in partnership with Three to Be to assess the effectiveness of their PAL Toolkit which helps to support families after receiving a child’s diagnosis of a neurological disorder. Our partnership focused on building the capacities of Three to Be to conduct their own evaluations over time.
International Development Resource Centre (IDRC)
IDRC has been one of the Evaluation Centre’s strongest supporters in both its evaluations of specific projects as well as its capacity building work. Evaluators and researchers from IDRC have all supported the Centre and have collaborated with evaluators at the Centre in multiple publications, events and projects. IDRC helped the Evaluation Centre break into international development and global health work.