About the project

The evaluating Refugee Programs project was a three-year project (2018-March 2021), funded by Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada via the Service Development Improvements program. This project aimed to build evaluation capacity in the resettlement sector across Canada to improve services and outcomes for refugee newcomers. The Centre for Community Based Research (CCBR) worked with the Evaluation Capacity Network, University of Alberta, to lead this project.

About my role

As M&E mentor, my role was to provide guidance and monitoring and evaluation support to settlement organizations across the province of Ontario as needed. Among all, my responsibilities were to:

1. Facilitate training sessions on result-based management and M&E;
2. Conduct formative, summative and developmental evaluation;
3. Provide support to settlement organizations to develop monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system;
4. Develop data collection tools and dashboards.

About my accomplishment

I had the opportunity to collaborate with several settlement organizations in Ottawa including Refugee613, Société Économique de l’Ontario (SEO), Vanier Community Services Centre and Economic and Social Council of Ottawa-Carleton. I provided them with knowledge, skills, tools and guidance to evaluate their projects through a monitoring and evaluation training session facilitated in collaboration with the Centre for Community Based Research. This session was focused on the community-based approach as opposed to the expert-based evaluation approach. Here are some key elements developed during this training session:

1. The importance of project evaluation
2. How and when to conduct projects evaluation
3. Model logic and theory of change
4. Different components of the community-based evaluation approach
5. How to define evaluation purpose and questions
6. Data collection methods
7. Data analysis approach
8. How to use the results of an evaluation effectively.

This training was interactive. Participants were able to develop their own evaluation approach by following the template we provided them.