It's autumn again in New England. Tell-tale signs are changing foliage, apple picking, everything pumpkin, and the GRG staff retreat (see article below for more on the staff retreat).  

 

Fall is also conference season, and GRG has been present at a few very interesting ones so far this season. Over the past eight years, GRG has conducted evaluations of scholarship and college access programs. A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of co-facilitating with our director of research, Colleen

Manning, three different workshops on program evaluation for the National Scholarship Providers Association (NSPA) annual conference in beautiful Charleston, S.C. We had been asked by

 NSPA's executive director, Amy Weinstein, to present an evaluation track, because there was increased interest by NSPA's members in evaluation. The first session was Evaluating Strategies for Limited Budgets, and the two afternoon interactive workshops were Jumping into Evaluation (with a focus on developing a logic model and using it for evaluation) and Assessing Your Organization's Readiness to Conduct Evaluations and Helping Move the Process Along. One of the activities was having workshop attendees fill out an assessment and participate in dot voting. Not surprisingly, they gave themselves the lowest number of points in evaluation planning.