Program Aims to Produce Home-Grown Evaluators

The $87,000 donation to the University of Mississippi's Center for Research Evaluation, or CERE, was used to recruit four Mississippi college students – known as Mississippi Emerging Evaluators fellows – and train them in the foundations of evaluation.

"This is a project I have been dreaming about for quite some time," said Sarah Mason, CERE director. "It's important that Mississippi-based projects are evaluated by people who know Mississippi, not people who fly in and out and have little understanding of the local context.

"There are very few Mississippi-based evaluators. With this gift, we will be working to build a pipeline of Mississippi-based evaluators so that hopefully there will be more and more Mississippians who know and love evaluation."

The center's inaugural MEE fellows are:

• Tyren Boyd, an Ole Miss sophomore majoring in public policy leadership and rhetoric, from Indianola
• Bre'Anna Coleman, a UM senior studying political science and interdisciplinary studies, including minors in journalism, creative writing and African American studies, from Drew
• Amel Mohamed, a doctoral student in public health at Jackson State University, from Brandon
• My'Keyia Neal, a graduate student in nonprofit management at Delta State University, from Charleston.

The Ole Miss center evaluates the effectiveness of projects that, for example, aim to improve mental health, reduce health disparities or increase college retention rates.

"All around the world, people spend large amounts of money and time trying to make a positive impact," Mason said. "We do research to find out if these efforts actually do have a positive impact.

"We then share the findings with those who design and fund the programs to help them maximize their impact on the world."

The foundation funding was made possible through a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which focuses on enhancing early childhood education and educational systems in Mississippi. During the second half of the fellows' 10-month training, they will apply what they've learned about evaluation to a real-world evaluation project with one of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation grantees in Mississippi.

"This gift is so unique for our center," Mason said. "We are funded via grants and contracts for evaluation work, so we don't usually have the opportunity to run programs ourselves.

"This gift gives us the opportunity to give back to Mississippi and directly run a program that will hopefully help to create the foundations for an evaluation workforce."

The decision to help CERE was an easy one, said Jane Alexander, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for Mississippi.

"The Community Foundation for Mississippi values its partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation precisely because it introduces us to the expertise of partners like CERE," Alexander said. "CERE has an impeccable reputation as a thought partner and implementation team for research and evaluation."

Recently, the foundation conducted its own social program: working to establish ways to measure improvements in the provision of early learning efforts in Mississippi, including ways to differentiate types of early learning options, and to help identify approaches to filling the gaps in early childhood education.

"Looking at a policy piece like early childhood education, it's entirely appropriate to work together to address the pipeline as a whole, not just one small piece of the picture," Alexander said. "Too often, evaluation feels like an afterthought, instead of a co-designed approach to define goals well, establish the parameters for the work, and being willing to pivot as the learning process suggests – ultimately leading to better outcomes, or, at least, explanations of why the assumptions we have may be flawed.

"CERE's effort to train more evaluators in Mississippi is a pathway to workforce development, but also one which will strengthen the sector immeasurably."

Top: The inaugural Mississippi Emerging Evaluators fellows at the Center for Research Evaluation are My'Keyia Neal (left), a graduate student at Delta State University; Bre'Anna Coleman (center, top), an Ole Miss senior; Amel Mohamed (center, bottom), a doctoral student at Jackson State University; and Tyren Boyd, a UM sophomore. The fellows are being trained to evaluate the effectiveness of social programs in Mississippi, thanks to a gift from the Community Foundation of Mississippi. Submitted photos