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 Why evaluate?
- A major component of the grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is evaluation. How well does this project bring together farmers, commodity groups, nonprofit agencies and university and community partners? What kind of impact do the working groups and the project as a whole have on selected value chains?
Role of the evaluator
- The evaluator identifies the process inherent in an activity, measures that process to determine outcomes, and reports on those outcomes.
- Three project evaluators attend all coordination team meetings and most working group meetings. Instead of being involved externally, they understand the program and keep evaluation central to project activities.
Research Institute for Studies in Education (RISE)
- Project evaluators are part of RISE at Iowa State University.
- At the project level, RISE creates assessment instruments to identify progress of each working group.
- At the cluster level, evaluators from RISE and from other Kellogg projects gather information about similar projects to provide feedback, identify challenges and share information across projects.
The logic model
- Evaluators use the Project Logic Model from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. It can be used to identify an evaluation plan, and to determine what to measure and how these measurements can be used.
An Iowa example
- This example begins at the end (5) because we first identify the desired impact, then work backward to determine how to achieve that impact.
- A Desired Impact for the Regional Food System Working Group may be to diversify the Iowa agricultural landscape with different farming efforts.
- An Outcome may be an increase in the development of sparkling grape juice grown on Iowa farms and produced in Iowa.
- An Output may be the development of the transportation logistics for storing and transporting sparkling grape juice within a value chain.
- An Activity may be a study to determine how to store sparkling grape juice to ensure that it remains fresh and is delivered to consumers within a defined time.
- A Resource to support the study may include a viticulturalists who understands and researches the process of making sparkling grape juice from Iowa grapes. An Input may be the funding to support the viticulturalist researcher.
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