AEA Colleagues!,

Fresh off of the annual conference this past week in Minneapolis, I wish to extend another sincere thank you to all who attended what I hope was a wonderful conference-going experience. Additionally, I extend a special thank you to those who played any part in contributing to the conference from reviewers to volunteers, from local arrangements committee to the Minnesota affiliate to the Presidential Strand Task Force. Finally, the support of our wonderful and talented staff of the Association deserve credit for pulling off a record attendance, all while seamlessly moving the conference materials from one hotel to the convention center late Wednesday night and ensuring that all our needs were met!

If you had an opportunity to attend the closing plenary, you will recall the photos submitted by members who captured Evaluation in Complex Ecologies throughout their daily lives. The images featured provocative, funny, serious, challenging, and inspiring images about relationships we foster, responsibilities we uphold, and relevance of our work as evaluators. From Minneapolis to Dublin to Paris and Budapest, the pictures showed us in our element affecting change among youth, practitioners to community members in quite dynamic and fulfilling ways. The images reminded us to be careful about how we interface and interact with stakeholders, how to honor the tapestry of diversity in the field, and why our craft is important in the lives of all those we work so hard to affect. Stay tuned to see a copy of the short video we shared of the images that will be posted on the AEA website in the coming month.

What a thrill it was to participate in the closing ceremony with Gavino Limon, the 3-year-old warrior of an evaluator who had us all dancing around the conference room celebrating the conference and the lives we live as evaluators! If nothing else, the end of the conference (and the image of Gavino who transformed from a playful 3-year-old to a serious performer and presenter) reminded me of the words of the author, Paulo Coelho who wrote in The Alchemist, "But if you believe yourself worthy of the thing you fought so hard to get, then you become an instrument of God, you help the Soul of the World, and you understand why you are here." While I felt a sense of enormous accomplishment by Saturday evening of the conference, I was especially touched by the purpose of our collective work and how we might affect change to all those programs, projects, personnel, and policies we work so hard to make better.

For those who returned from Minneapolis or who were in the path of the superstorm this past week, I pray for your safe well-being in the days ahead.

Sincerely,

Rodney 

Rodney Hopson  

AEA President 2012

I'm George Julnes, professor of public and international affairs at the University of Baltimore and currently a member of the AEA Board. I have been a member of AEA for over 20 years and previously spent a dozen years as a leader of AEA's Quantitative Methods TIG. In all of this time, I worked on evaluations for federal and state agencies and also published and taught on evaluation theory and practice, with the common thread of trying to make the world "a better place."

As such, I appreciate the opportunity to comment here on AEA's Value Statement. While we may focus most on the activities of our association, the Value Statement is the foundation of all we do - and it's a major reason many of us value our membership in the evaluation community that AEA supports. Just reading over this statement, I find myself nodding in appreciation of each sentence, but let me focus on only a couple points.

First, I'm proud to be a member of an organization where the ultimate commitment is to "the enhancement of the public good." In making decisions in evaluation practice, this ultimate value is like a beacon to me in navigating around the inevitable value conflicts. While there will always be debates about what constitutes the public good, or "social betterment," particularly in terms of such often conflicting values as efficiency, equity, community, and liberty, we can at least be united in committing ourselves to serving it.

Second, I value being in an organization that stands forthrightly for being inclusive and culturally responsive. These might seem like obvious, correct stances now, but we know it was not always so, that these positions represent hard-won lessons that goad us in practice to ensure the voice of those long-denied and to not assume our own cultural superiority. These values also guide our service to AEA; whether as members of AEA working groups, task forces, or TIGs, these stated values prompt us to push AEA to be its best.

Finally, I appreciate the commitment to the global and international evaluation community. By being a premier forum for the international evaluation community, AEA helps its members learn best practices from around the world, including issues concerning context-sensitive methodology and cultural understanding. Continuing this global sharing is important not only in broadening the positive impact of AEA but also in renewing the best in AEA's underlying values.

"As a member of AEA since its inception I have been an active participant and leader in the development of the Systems, and Business and Industry TIGS. My career throughout this time has progressed along multiple intersecting paths. Along one path I have conducted a great deal of hands-on evaluation across a wide range of topics. In recent years I have been working with the Department of Transportation on innovative programs related to risk, safety promotion, and safety culture. My activities have included the evaluation of industry pilot projects funded by the Federal Railroad Administration, and internal change at the Department level. Because of this work I have had the privilege of seeing firsthand how the conduct of evaluation and the output of evaluation combine to affect policy. Along the second path I have contributed to evaluation theory by teaching and writing about logic models, and about the evaluation of programs that exhibit unexpected outcomes. I have also been doing research on the potential of agent-based complex systems as evaluation tools. Finally, as the editor of Evaluation and Program Planning, I have had extensive opportunity to interact with a wide variety of evaluators around the globe. It has been a revelation to understand who they are and what they do. These combined experiences have caused me to think a lot about how AEA reflects the field of evaluation, and where the organization might go from here.

"I believe that AEA is an organization that has grown organically into what it is now. Over time, some people doing the work we call "evaluation" joined AEA because they saw the organization as a fitting home. That membership interacted with the election of board members, the presentations we made, the writing we produced, and the conversations we had with colleagues. Over time, we have become what we are. We have grown into a community of practice. This growth process is how professional communities should form. It has worked for us. It has become something that nurtures our professional identity and our intellectual needs. At the same time though, we need to acknowledge that the range of evaluation activity and theory is broader than what is represented by the members of AEA.

"An imperfect overlap between AEA and the totality of evaluation is as it should be. We cannot and should not strive to expand over the entire domain of evaluation. What our community of practice can benefit from, however, is learning from methodological approaches we seldom use, and from choices about evaluation design and data interpretation rooted in values other than ours. We do not have to use those methods or act on those values, but we do need to be aware of what they are and why they matter. I do not favor methodological and values diversity for their own sake. I favor methodological and values diversity because appreciating them will lead to what I do favor: deeper understanding of program theory, better methodology, more powerful data interpretation, more appeal to a greater variety of stakeholders, and more influence on policy. I also think that as we enrich our understanding of evaluation, AEA's growth path will evolve to expand our membership.

"Overall, my experience has sensitized me to three issues that the AEA Board has been working with: evaluation in policy making, diversity (in all its diverse meanings), and listening to global evaluation activities. If I am granted the honor of serving on the Board these are the initiatives I will seek to advance. AEA has been a supporting professional community that has helped me become a better evaluator. As a recipient of the Ingle and Lazarsfeld awards, I feel a deep sense of acceptance by my peers. I want to serve on the Board to help us move from strength to strength."

We welcome Jonny and thank all who voted in this year's election.

You've been called out to a meeting. You've paid close attention to the step-by-step instructions but you need to review a detail here or there. Your laptop battery empties and you're disconnected from the webinar. You'd have to wake up at 4 am to attend, due to time zone differences. We know how it goes - life sometimes gets in the way of your earnest efforts to learn from online courses.

That's why, beginning with our January 2013 courses, all Professional Development eStudies will be recorded. We record so you can access the same content you paid for at your own convenience (like when your laptop battery recharges).

Recordings of each session will be made available for 14 days to those who register for the eStudy course. Attendees will receive a link and a password to access the recording the same day the session is scheduled. Now, the recordings won't be downloadable. But you will be able to pause, rewind, and review as much as you need for two weeks after the session takes place.

Here are the eStudy courses you can look forward to accessing by recording in January:

Applications of Correlation and Regression: Mediation, Moderation, and More
 Wednesdays January 9, 16, 23, and 30 1:30-3:00 PM ET with Dale Berger

Creating and Automating Dashboards Using MS Word and Excel
Tuesdays January 15 & 22, 1:00-2:30 PM ET with Agata Jose-Ivanina & Ann Emery 

There's still time (but not much) to register for the remaining 2012 eStudy courses:

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Planning for Programs/Projects
 Tuesday & Thursday November 13 & 15, 12:00-1:30 PM ET with Scott Chaplowe
(Registration closes November 7)

Creating Surveys to Measure Performance and Assess Needs
Tuesday & Thursday December 4 & 6, 3:00-4:30 PM ET with Michelle Kobayashi
(Registration closes November 27)

Read more details and access the registration link here: http://comm.eval.org/coffee_break_webinars/estudy/

Go to the eStudy Website Page

 Whew, you did it! You crafted a strong message, prepared great slides, and landed an awesome delivery. Now, before you totally relax, think about how you can extend your work with these post-conference activities:

• Tweak your content based on the feedback you heard. Doing this now, while the session is fresh in your mind, will reduce your burden when you present this information again.
• Contact or reply to those who heard, or heard of, your presentation. If you were presenting a paper, you should be prepared to email the completed paper. You may want to ask about their work to see how it might mesh with your own in ways that could be advantageous to you both.

Also, consider uploading your session materials to the AEA eLibrary for others to download and share.

Did you miss a p2i session? Want to review something you saw us present? The slides and handouts for each of our sessions are now available at http://p2i.eval.org/.
 

Go to the Potent Presentations Webpage

AEA member David Fetterman is author of a new book, Empowerment Evaluation in the Digital Villages: Hewlett-Packard's $15 Million Race Toward Social Justice, published by Stanford University Press.

From the Publisher's Site:

"Empowerment Evaluation in the Digital Villages analyzes a $15 million community change initiative designed to bridge the digital divide in East Palo Alto, East Baltimore, and San Diego. Involving a partnership between Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University, and three ethnically diverse communities, this initiative enabled its constituencies to build their own technology-oriented businesses, improve their education systems, and improve their economic health. While examining this large-scale, multi-site case, Fetterman highlights the power of empowerment evaluation to build local capacity and sustain improvements within communities. He provides deep insights into key steps in empowerment evaluation by exploring the way that each of these steps took place in the digital villages. Additionally, the text provides evaluators with real-world stories and practical advice from the front lines. The Digital Village case also demonstrates the social value of combining corporate philanthropy, academic prowess, and community empowerment-highlighting the role of evaluation in this process."

From the Author:

"Aside from the racing metaphor used throughout the book to highlight the urgency driving issues of social justice," says Fetterman, "what sets this book apart from others is that it is not a sanitized account of what happened. Problems, wrong turns, and even crashes are discussed and contemplated. This story is about real people taking charge of their lives in less than ideal circumstances and succeeding, accomplishing their objectives. It is a story about resilience. This book also sheds light on those who fund and facilitate these efforts and how they had the strength and foresight to let go of much of their power in order to allow community members to empower themselves.

"This was a large-scale community-based initiative funded at a level designed to make a difference. The most rewarding part is that it worked. It was not only an engaging process, inviting participation throughout the communities but it helped bridge the digital divide in communities of color. Native Americans built the largest unlicensed wireless system in the country, according to the head of the FCC. Small businesses blossomed in African American communities. Schools were enriched with technology and the training to use it. More to the point, people learned how to use evaluation to monitor their progress, assess their efforts, and produce results."

About the Author:

David M. Fetterman is President and CEO of Fetterman & Associates, an international evaluation consulting firm. He is Professor of Education at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and the Director of the Arkansas Evaluation Center. He has held positions in Stanford University's administration, School of Education, and School of Medicine. A past-president of AEA, Fetterman is one of two recipients to receive both the Myrdal Award for evaluation practice and the Lazarsfeld Award for evaluation theory. He is co-chair, with Liliana Rodrequez-Campos, of the Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment Evaluation TIG. Recent books include Empowerment Evaluation Principles in Practice (with Abraham Wandersman) and Ethnography: Step by Step, 3rd Edition. To learn more about Fetterman, visit www.davidfetterman.com.

Go to the Publisher's Site