A gift from the Community Foundation for Mississippi (TCFM) and W.K. Kellogg Foundation is underwriting a project designed to equip individuals to evaluate the effectiveness of social programs in Mississippi.
The $87,000 donation to the University of Mississippi’s Center for Research Evaluation (CERE) was used to recruit four Mississippi-based college students — known as Mississippi Emerging Evaluators (MEE) Fellows — and train them in the foundations of evaluation.
CERE’s inaugural MEE Fellows are UM sophomore Tyren Boyd of Indianola, Mississippi; UM senior Bre’Anna Coleman of Drew, Mississippi; Amel Mohamed of Brandon, Mississippi, a graduate student at Jackson State University; and My’Keyia Neal of Charleston, Mississippi, a graduate student at Delta State University.
“This is a project I have been dreaming about for quite some time,” said CERE director Sarah Mason. “It’s important that Mississippi-based projects are evaluated by people who know Mississippi, not people who fly in and out and have little understanding of the local context.
“There are very few Mississippi-based evaluators,” she continued. “With this gift, we will be working to build a pipeline of Mississippi-based evaluators so that hopefully there will be more and more Mississippians who know and love evaluation.”
CERE at Ole Miss evaluates the effectiveness of projects that, for example, aim to improve mental health, reduce health disparities or increase college retention rates.
“All around the world people spend large amounts of money and time trying to make a positive impact. We do research to find out if these efforts actually do have a positive impact,” Mason said. “We then share the findings with those who design and fund the programs to help them maximize their impact on the world.”
TCFM funding was made possible through a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, which focuses on enhancing early childhood education and educational systems in Mississippi. During the second half of CERE Fellows’ 10-month training, they will apply what they’ve learned about evaluation to a real-world evaluation project with one of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation grantees in Mississippi.
“This gift is so unique for our center. We are funded via grants and contracts for evaluation work, so we don’t usually have the opportunity to run programs ourselves,” Mason said. “This gift gives us the opportunity to give back to Mississippi and directly run a program that will hopefully help to create the foundations for an evaluation workforce.”
Jane Alexander, president and CEO of the Community Foundation for Mississippi, said the decision to help CERE was an easy one.
“The Community Foundation for Mississippi values its partnership with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation precisely because it introduces us to the expertise of partners like CERE,” Alexander said. “CERE has an impeccable reputation as a thought partner and implementation team for research and evaluation. So, that made it an easy choice.”
Recently, TCFM conducted its own social program: working to establish ways to measure improvements in the provision of early learning efforts in Mississippi, including ways to differentiate types of early learning options, and to help identify approaches to filling the gaps in early childhood education.
“Looking at a policy piece like early childhood education, it’s entirely appropriate to work together to address the pipeline as a whole, not just one small piece of the picture,” Alexander said. “Too often, evaluation feels like an afterthought, instead of a co-designed approach to define goals well, establish the parameters for the work, and being willing to pivot as the learning process suggests – ultimately leading to better outcomes, or, at least, explanations of why the assumptions we have may be flawed.
“CERE’s effort to train more evaluators in Mississippi is a pathway to workforce development, but also one which will strengthen the sector immeasurably.”
For information on supporting CERE at Ole Miss or other programs, contact Katie Morrison, director of foundation relations in the Office of Development, at katie@olemiss.edu or 662-915-2135.
By Bill Dabney/UM Foundation