For Bring Up Nebraska partners, evaluation is work that generates new knowledge and is focused on answering questions about how, why, and to what extent objectives or goals are achieved. Because we believe that communities are the most powerful vehicle available for delivering positive change for our state’s kids, much of the evaluation efforts focus on community-level prevention work. For the same reason, Bring Up Nebraska partners are also invested in “setting communities up for success” when it comes to evaluation work. What this looks likes varies from community to community; however, commonalities include:
- Facilitation of community conversations to identify and commit to shared goals and related metrics,
- Provision of ongoing, tailored, technical assistance from Nebraska Children’s staff and external evaluation partners related to data collection, data interpretation, and data use, and
- For the core components of Nebraska Children’s work (for example, the collective impact approach and specific prevention strategies), development and continuous improvement of processes designed to ease the burden of data collection, while maintaining and ensuring data quality.
Supported by external evaluation partners, communities collect both implementation and outcome data to answer evaluative questions related to the collaborative functions of locally-based prevention systems as well as the strategies associated with these systems.
Nebraska Community Opportunity Map
The Nebraska Community Opportunity Map is an interactive tool that highlights the aspects of communities associated with safe children and strong families. This free resource is designed to empower people working in and with communities across the state by providing easily accessible, timely, relevant, and high-quality data.
