Services for Community Partners
Partnership Development
CERC facilitates partnerships for research and evaluation by bringing community groups together with researchers and evaluators to address community-based research questions and assess the quality and effectiveness of programs.
Program Evaluation
Increasingly, funders are demanding accountability and evidence of program outcomes. As a result, organizations need to be able to demonstrate that their programs have been implemented with fidelity to their models and are achieving their intended outcomes. CERC offers the following evaluation services:
- Needs and assets assessments to determine not just the needs of populations of interest, but the assets they possess that will help to address the targeted problem
- Logic models and theories of change to visualize how program resources and activities will contribute to the desired outcomes
- Process evaluations to determine whether a program is being delivered as intended to the right people
- Impact evaluations to determine whether a program is having the desired effects
- Formative evaluations to improve program performance
- Summative evaluations to assess program merit, worth, and significance
Community-Based Participatory Research
Using a participatory approach to conducting research with community as collaborators helps to expand our knowledge base by combining local or indigenous knowledge with scientific knowledge. CERC offers the following services regarding community-based participatory research:
- Training and consulting for organizations interested in playing an active role in research regarding community defined issues
- Training and consulting for researchers interested in using a participatory approach in their work
Research and Evaluation Capacity Building and Training
CERC can assist community organizations in developing their own capacity for evaluation and research and provide them with the tools to examine the effectiveness of their programs.