About the project

Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), the Storytelling, Training, Advocacy and Youth drop-in (STAY) is a project implemented by Head and Hands, that aims to respond to important issues with the Black youth in Montreal by implementing activities that will support the emotional well-being of Black youth who have been involved with child welfare or protective services.

About my role

As project evaluation consultant, my role is to provide coaching, and technical support to the Project Team on the evaluation design and implementation process of the STAY Project, which is divided into three main outcomes:

- Outcome #1: Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Capacity Building;
- Outcome #2: Develop the MEL system for the STAY project;
- Outcome #3: MEL system implementation and ongoing support.

About my accomplishment

Regarding the first outcome, I have evaluated the MEL capacity of the STAY project stakeholders and developed the training materials accordingly. In addition, I have facilitated two-two hour participative and interactive online MEL training sessions to provide the team with skills, knowledge, and tools/templates to develop a MEL system. The training was focused on some key elements of result-based management such as logic model (LM), theory of change (ToC), and performance measurement framework (PMF).

As for the second outcome, I am currently supporting the team in developing the MEL system of the STAY project, which will include the LM, PMF, data collection tools, project activity tracking sheet, dashboard, and the learning strategy. To do so, I am using a community-based approach, which is stakeholders driving, participative and action-oriented. A steering committee with all stakeholders representatives (youth, project team, partners, etc.) has been created to guide the whole process by providing feedback and suggestions on outcomes and outputs statements, indicators, data collection strategy, etc.

The MEL system has been created. Currently, I am supporting the STAY project team in implementing it. We have facilitated a learning event to discuss specific challenges and potential solutions that community evaluation projects face with ethics, data, and recruitment when it comes to meaningfully engage with youth. The report is available on this website.