Agenda for Children Program Evaluation

Client: Agenda for Children Literacy Initiative, City of Cambridge
Topic Areas: Children, youth, and families; Maternal and child health
Service: Participatory Evaluation

For over 15 years, ICH has served as the evaluator for the Agenda for Children (AFC), a literacy initiative of the city of Cambridge designed to educate parents of children ages 0-7 about how to support language and literacy development. Through this partnership, ICH has worked with AFC program staff to track and evaluate participation in several programs including Let’s Talk, Pathways, and Cambridge Dads. ICH’s work has included design of databases to document program participation, development of logic models for AFC overall and for individual programs, and a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis efforts. ICH has conducted qualitative interviews with home visiting participants, collected survey data from workshop participants, and led a photovoice project with Pathways program participants to understand the impact of the program in a nuanced and dynamic way. ICH has also helped staff to use evaluation data to guide decisions on new program development. As a result of our work together, AFC has been better able to identify the needs of Cambridge families and make data-informed decisions about how to expand and develop new programming.  Most recently, AFC has expanded its home visiting program for new parents and developed Cambridge Dads, a program that offers a range of supports to Cambridge area fathers to build self-efficacy as parents and to provide opportunities to engage with their children and peers.