A retrospective case study of long-term evaluation capacity building at neighborhood house

Abstract

This thesis provides a case study of how evaluation capacity has been built at one mid-size social service non-profit organization over the last eleven years. Through reviewing documents and conducting interviews with current and past staff of Neighborhood House in St. Paul, Minnesota, the author determined the facilitators and barriers to successful evaluation capacity building as well as the indicators and outcomes of successful ECB work in this context. The thesis presents a model, in logic model format, for how ECB has worked at Neighborhood House. The lessons learned over eleven years of sustained ECB work should prove useful to evaluators and ECB practitioners doing similar work.