The Jim Joseph Foundation, a relatively new foundation devoted exclusively to supporting the education of Jewish youth, was poised to launch a new seven-year, seven-million–dollar investment called the Professional Development Initiative (PDI).
Conducted in partnership with the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO), the PDI was designed to foster new leaders for Jewish communal work by supporting Jewish educators early in their careers to obtain MBAs and Certificates in Jewish Education.
The Foundation called on BTW as this initiative was being designed and asked us to develop a plan to evaluate the program’s impact. The Foundation wanted the evaluation to include a formative component that would assess the early implementation of the PDI and inform mid-project course corrections, as well as a summative assessment of the impact of the program.
Before even developing the evaluation plan, BTW urged that the Foundation and BBYO come to a crystal-clear, shared understanding of the PDI’s purpose, strategies and expected outcomes. To ensure this common understanding, BTW engaged the partners in a process of meetings, resulting in the development of a formal PDI Theory of Change.
With the theory of change in place, BTW created an evaluation plan to track progress toward the identified benchmarks, both for the program as a whole and for each of the three planned cohorts. The theory of change has given the client, evaluation team, participating grantees and other stakeholders a shared framework from which to discuss progress and strategic adjustments.
BTW has produced two interim reports to date: one formative assessment that documents the program’s start-up, and a second-year report that monitors the progress of Cohort I and the program. The evaluation is slated to continue through 2015.
