[Mourer]

Having only a week of in person contact with our participants is a challenging barrier to evaluation. Dealing with relationships and human connections brings some barrier of human complexity and nuance of individual styles of relating. Evaluating and getting feedback from stakeholders not at camp is another barrier to be overcome.

[Julia]

I am running my first overnight summer camp, and while I have loads of experience, everything is new for this camp I’m building. Barriers include external stakeholders aka people who aren’t at camp, and how we include them, plus how we encourage teens to get involved in various methods

[Cecilia]

For us, we run both internal and external programs and we have a lot of each. Our research team is only three people (one of which is part-time), so it can be hard to get time with them because they’re working not only on evaluating our programs individually but also putting together reports for our board and funders, as well as handling grant applications for new streams of funding. So sometimes, an evaluation process can’t take place exactly when you want it to.

[Meera]

With our program, we try to evaluate if youths are finding employment after attending our weekly mentor workshops. We find that once a youth finds employment, we do not hear back from them unless they require further resources. I think if we have funding to provide to youths, with some sort of support once they found a job. There might be a higher chance for them to notify us that they did fine employment.

[jayal]

I have supported some other youth/artists with writing grants over the years and learned alot in that process and had some informal mentorship and generally seek out learning opportunities when I can. Many young leaders/folks I think lack time and limited funds for in-depth evaluation, maybe skills/access to knowledge or support for evaluation/evaluators. Some collectives may not have a board established or as many volunteers/changing alot, so core members are delivering program, doing administrative work and alot while trying to learn and continue in the processes of re-applying for funding etc. Another barrier might simply be not understanding different benefits of evaluation or depending on who is doing/to do evaluation is maybe like a distrust or feeling the process is just extractive.

[Caroline]

Thanks for sharing, Jayal. Almost everything you shared can be categorized as a lack of capacity for evaluation, which is one of the biggest barriers that a lot of organizations experience. Whether it’s time, human resources, money or knowledge, there are many aspects that go into successful evaluation design, planning, and implementation!

[Caroline]

Hi, Sheila! This is a great question to ask. I’ll share one barrier that I’ve encountered as someone who helps sports organizations with their evaluations. Some of the groups I’ve worked with have specific outcomes they want to measure through their programs, but there is no sport-specific evaluation tool (e.g., survey) available for them to use. They often have to take validated tools from other fields (e.g., education) and try to change some of the questions to be sport-focused. Or, they create their own! This can be a barrier at times because they don’t always know if the tools they edited/created are measuring what they think are measuring. As we know, validity is important for evaluation!