With funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada, in partnership with the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, CAPTURE embarked on a project to understand and support the evaluation needs of organizations working with northern, remote and Aboriginal communities. Reciprocal Consulting (Dr. Kim van der Woerd, Billy Joe Rogers, Kylee Swift, and Samantha Tsuruda) was engaged to help CAPTURE with this work.
There were three main components of the project:
- Providing evaluation support to three CLASPs (Coalitions Linking Action and Science for Prevention). Funded by the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer, CLASPs are coalitions of organizations – including disease-specific groups, health ministries and cancer agencies – who collaborate to integrate research, practice and policy work on cancer and chronic disease prevention and to accelerate action on shared priorities. This component of the project resulted in three annotated bibliographies:
- Evaluation Capacity Building
- Research with Aboriginal Communities
- Health Promotion in the North
- Supporting organizations to use culturally-appropriate data collection tools. This work aimed to create a resource that provides a set of overarching principles and guidance for anyone who is seeking to adapt data collection tools to meet their community’s unique needs. This component of the project resulted in two documents:
- Adaptation Framework: Adapting Existing Survey Tools for use in Northern, Rural and Aboriginal Communities
- Methodology for Developing the Adaptation Framework
- Exploring and documenting the evaluation needs of organizations working with northern, remote and Aboriginal communities. Reciprocal Consulting engaged close to 300 people from across Canada through focus groups and an on-line survey. Using of solutions-focused questioning, the project team was able to document both the challenges respondents face in conducting evaluations, and the solutions they propose for working effectively in northern, remote and Aboriginal communities. This component of the project resulted in two documents:
- Final Report: “Sage Advice: Real-World Approaches to Program Evaluation in Northern, Remote & Aboriginal Communities ”
- Technical Report (available upon request)
