Leadership
and Evaluation
Recent Case Studies
Showcase Legal Aid Leadership Styles and the Evaluation Tools that
Enable Them
The Resource
has been involved in two recent efforts that are dramatically expanding
the range of simple, effective tools for program self-evaluation.
This article outlines these efforts and indicates where people can
get access to the results.
Evaluation
is taking on new currency as a leadership tool among legal services
managers and funders alike. At the heart of this trend is "Program-Owned
Evaluation," which, in contrast to the traditional view of
evaluation as something imposed from outside by funders, is initiated
from within by program management to help assess how well delivery
system strategies, staff performance, and quality assurance systems
are working.
Because program-owned
evaluation proves especially helpful in determining how to make
programs more successful, more cost-effective, more accountable,
and more accessible to the client population, it should not seem
at all surprising that this approach is gaining popularity. Two
recent efforts are moving the state-of-the-art quickly forward.
In the first
effort, The Resource's Ken Smith and partners John Tull and John
Scanlon have worked with the California Equal Access Fund (EAF)
to develop an "Evaluation Toolkit" for use by EAF grantees to assess
their own projects. Among the tools that are being made available
to the legal aid community generally are client satisfaction surveys,
case outcome measures, focus group studies and in-court observation
protocols. These tools will be made publicly accessible on the Web
in October -- Click here for further
information about how to obtain copies of these tools.
In the second
effort, a group of national leaders in program-owned evaluation
- Martha Bergmark, John Scanlon, Ken Smith, John Tull, and Wayne
Moore - collaborated to develop a series of ten case studies demonstrating
how legal services leaders employ self-evaluation as a strategic
part of their leadership methods. The case studies profile some
of the best-known leaders in the legal services community including
Neal McBride, Mary Asbury, Jeanne Charn and Ross Dollof.
The case studies
describe 20 evaluation tools that programs are using to measure
seven different domains of program performance, illustrating how
a broad array of methods can be adapted to complement a variety
of leadership styles. The powerful insights contained in these profiles
demonstrate how programs, their client communities, their funders
and partners all benefit when legal aid leaders refuse to be complacent
about the performance of their programs. Click
here for information about how to obtain copies of these case
studies.
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