Promote Program Quality & Access

Impact Team Agenda

Enable youth to determine what programs will serve them best, remove barriers that prevent those programs from working with schools, enable program quality evaluation and continuous improvement.

  • Develop youth leaders who can identify community programs to support youth needs. 

  • Develop a community partner certification program that will guide those partners through how to operate in DPS

  • Provide coaching in partnership with researchers  on how to define and measure success.  

  • Provide infrastructure for data collection and configure it in alignment with defined measures.

  • Establish analysis support for program quality evaluation.

  • Explore opportunities for extending proposed approach to cover greater Denver area and integration with city systems.

Note: whereas the Measure & Monitor Success impact team focuses on evaluating the overall success of our efforts citywide - looking at the outcomes for youth and families, this impact team is focused on understanding the effectiveness of specific programs in achieving their goals. We recognize that in an ideal world, we would be able to directly tie programmatic work to our desired outcomes, but this will take longitudinal research studies that require several years, if not decades of data. Our coalition has therefore landed on this two-pronged approach to evaluating success.

Current Focus

We are focused on developing the community partner certification program, gaining consensus on what content should go into that program and thinking through the details of what it would take to roll it out. We intend to make this the focus of our grant application for the federal BJA STOP School Violence opportunity, once it re-releases, with a focus on funding the effort end-to-end for work taking place in two DPS middle schools.

Our Journey

You may find running notes from impact team meetings on this topic here.