ACET, Inc. Blog

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced the 11^th National Women’s Health Week (NWHW) for May 9-15, 2010 with the signature event National Women’s Check-Up Day on May 10, 2010. The goal of designating a NWHW is to raise awareness about women’s health and to increase women’s access to preventive health care services.

According to Carmen Nazario from the Administration for Children & Families, in 2009 more that 60,000 people participated in almost 1,300 WNHW activities nationwide. In 2010 the goal is to increase the impact of NWHW by expanding the number of activities that occur during the month of May.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has invited your organization to participate by hosting an educational workshop or offering health screening such as blood pressure checks, HIV tests, etc. Organizations that add NWHW events to the online activity registry (www.womenshealth.gov/whw) will be considered NWHW partners and are eligible for free promotional and educational materials to support their efforts, while supplies last. The registry just opened in March and participation is free. For more information, please visit www.womenshealth.gov/whw.

Heather

The National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections (NRCPFC) offers a webcast every week which may be a valuable resource for anyone working, involved, or interested in child welfare. You need only a computer with audio (or a computer and telephone) to participate.

Each webcast is free to the public, but registration for each event is mandatory. There are also materials to view which are available for download on the event web page.

Below is information for the next webcast:

Wednesday, April 7, 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT: Visit Coaching: Building on Family Strengths to Meet Children’s Needs

“Visits between children in foster care and their families often do not build on family strengths or help them to demonstrate that they can meet their children’s safety and developmental needs. Visits can alienate parents, children, and foster parents, and the parent’s grief, anger, and preoccupation with complying with court-ordered treatment often obscures their children’s needs. Visit coaching is an innovative approach that can replace parenting classes and office-based visits with hands-on guidance for families in meeting their children’s needs. Visit coaches, who may be caseworkers or a variety of other trained individuals, help parents take charge of visits and demonstrate more responsiveness to each child. Join the National Resource Center for Permanency and Family Connections (NRCPFC) Executive Director, Gerald P. Mallon, and NRCPFC Consultant, Marty Beyer for this webcast. They will discuss how the innovative approach of Visit Coaching can build on family strengths to meet children’s needs.”

To register for the webcast, visit: http://event.netbriefings.com/event/nrcfcpp/Live/nrcpfc20/.

If interested in learning more about NRCPFC, you can subscribe to their weekly newsletter at http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/socwork/nrcfcpp/update-subscription.html or check out their website at http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/socwork/nrcfcpp/.

Cassie

In September Kirsten and I attended a “Grant Writing Boot Camp^TM” facilitated by Dr. Bev Browning and co-sponsored by the Minnesota Department of Education and the Minnesota Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Prevention, and Parenting (MOAPPP). As evaluators, we don’t write a lot of grants, however sometimes we do help our clients write the evaluation sections of their proposals and both Kirsten and I have interest in building our grant writing skills. In our capacity at ACET, however, we are always on the look-out for funding opportunities that might be of interest to the organizations we work with, so it was really helpful that Dr. Browning covered popular and less utilized resources used to identify potential funders and gave insightful tips on grant writing in the workshop. Participants practiced writing grant applications including powerful statement of need, goal statements, and SMART objectives.

Dr. Browning spent a fair amount of time focusing on the importance of writing “great” goal statements (i.e., the end one strives to obtain) and the difference between the three types of objectives (i.e., major milestone or checkpoint on your rout to reaching a goal): outcome, process, and impact.

Dr. Browning’s suggestions for writing “great” goal statements include:

• Goal statements should be only one sentence in length;
• Goal statements should be clear and concise (i.e., who is the target population and where should they be at the end of the grant period);
• Goal statements should be action-oriented and full of verbs; and
• Goal statements should not include any measurements or timelines.

Here is an example of a good goal statement: The Earthquake Relief Organization will design a new program to educate government officials on building code standards to prevent future injuries and casualties from building collapse.

In her book Grant Writing for Dummies, Dr. Browning encourages grant writers to provide objectives for each goal (and each year) for which they are requesting funds, and outlines the differences between the three types of objectives.

Outcome objectives show what the project will accomplish with the planned activities and should include terms such as increase and decrease. Dr. Browning suggests thinking SMART when writing outcome objectives: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

Here is an example of a SMART outcome objective: Participants who have been in the program for one year or more will have maintained safe and stable housing for at least 3 months.

Process objectives are the activities needed to reach your goals and meet or exceed your measurable outcomes, or SMART objectives. Process objectives should include the actual, chronological activities that need to occur from the time you received grant funding until the monies have been spent. Dr. Browning suggests the best way to present your process objectives is in a table format (e.g., timeline chart). Process objectives should not include measurable terms (e.g., increase or decrease), they should, however, be written quantifiably.

Here is an example of a process objective: Six new staff will be trained to administer family counseling to program participants in the first year.

Impact objectives demonstrate the achievement of the goal of the project or program and show the reader there has been an impact or change on the target population. They are generally used when grant writers are asked to write about benefits to participants. There are no common words in impact objectives, but they should include signs of significant change.

Here is an example of an impact objective: Prevents family disruptions by providing intensive residential family services to women and children experiencing substance abuse.

I hope this information has been helpful. Do any of you have grant writing tips you would like to share with us?

Heather

While in March many may no longer be focused on setting or even maintaining New Year’s resolutions, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is gearing up to release their own ‘resolutions’ for the future of our nation’s health with Healthy People 2020. With each new set of resolutions, we see new health topics addressed and learn how current programs are functioning.  I was interested to learn how Healthy People has and will affect all levels of communities, from local schools to government agencies, and even individual residents.

The Healthy People program essentially sets the agenda for public and community health programming and funding. As a U.S. resident, this may influence the cost of your flu shot, the availability of healthy foods in your grocery store, the amount of time local students spend in gym class, and even the levels of pollutants permitted in the air we breathe. In addition, Healthy People objectives directly influence which aspects of public and community health receive increased funding in the decade to come.

The Healthy People movement began in 1979 when U.S. Surgeon General Julius B. Richmond published a set of nationwide goals and objectives focusing on health promotion and disease prevention (read more: http://www.healthypeople.gov/About/history.htm).  Since then, every decade a panel of experts has reevaluated and reestablished standards to guide health programming and funding streams.

Healthy People objectives were purposefully set to be challenging, yet attainable. Although they were established by the federal government, these objectives are evaluated by pooling resources and data from over 190 different sources from all levels – including federal, state and local governments, and non-profit agencies of all shapes and sizes.

Healthy People centers on two overarching goals: (1) to increase quality and years of healthy life; and (2) to eliminate health disparities. In addition, goals and objectives are set in 28 different focus areas, with 10 priority areas receiving special attention and extra funding – also known as the Leading Health Indicators. For Healthy People 2010, the Leading Health Indicators included:
1.    Physical Activity
2.    Overweight and Obesity
3.    Tobacco Use
4.    Substance Abuse
5.    Responsible Sexual Behavior
6.    Mental Health
7.    Injury and Violence
8.    Environmental Quality
9.    Immunization
10.    Access to Health Care
To learn more about why these areas were targeted and what programming has been established to address each, check out: http://www.healthypeople.gov/LHI/Priorities.htm

Healthy People 2020 objectives were released and open for comments during the fall of 2009. Healthy People 2020 includes goals and objectives in 11 new focus areas including: Genomics, Global Health, Health IT, Quality of Life and Well-being, and Social Determinants of Health. Some of these areas were addressed in other topic areas in the past, but several provide objectives for new and developing arenas of public health.

The Department of Health and Human Services thankfully does not just set these objectives and then hope that they’re met – they take systematic steps by evaluating progress after two and five years, which may then lead to the adjustment of programming and funding accordingly. To see progress reports from 2005 and 2008, check out: http://www.healthypeople.gov/data/PROGRVW/

Healthy People 2020 will provide a framework for future health programming – I’d encourage you to familiarize yourself with general goals and indicators, especially those in your area of expertise. Are they attainable? Are they applicable? Are they making a difference? Be sure to check out http://www.healthypeople.gov/HP2020/!

Emily

ACET offered its second community workshop, “The Results Are In,” on February 23^rd and would like to extend a word of thanks to all who attended. We highly appreciated the excellent attention, questions, and devotion to the material. The workshop, facilitated by ACET’s Evaluation Specialist, Joseph Curiel, shared a bit of knowledge on common types of survey data and how various types of data are related to analysis options. The workshop also provided participants with various options for graphically reporting data and several tips and tricks for making your visual displays both easy to understand and visually appealing.

The workshop was the second in a series of free community workshops ACET plans to facilitate in order to help organizations build their evaluation capacity. Be sure to subscribe to our blog to keep updated on future events and email Heather Scholz (heather@acetinc.com) if you are interested in attending future workshops or have suggestions for future workshops topics.

We are always in pursuit of new and interesting ways to visually represent all types of data. Qualitative data often presents challenges in doing this – it’s tough making a pie chart out of focus group data! So what are some options? Try Wordle (http://www.wordle.net), an online tool that generates visual representations, or “word clouds” from text. The more frequently a word appears in a selection of text, the larger it appears in the word cloud. The fun part is that Wordle allows you to change the fonts, shapes, and color schemes of the images it creates. We are using this more frequently in our focus group and interview summaries because the images offer an additional dimension of understanding to qualitative data that is difficult to perceive from reading standard text. Each of the ACET staff took a few minutes to create a Wordle example from famous pieces of literature. Which are your favorites?

My Wordle is an excerpt from The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas:

Joseph created a Wordle using an excerpt from Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky:

Cassie’s Wordle is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream:

Emily created a Wordle with an excerpt from Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin:

Stella’s Wordle came from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven:

And last, but not least, Kirsten crafted a Wordle with an excerpt from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens:
Heather