Projects

Evaluation of the Discovery Initiative

The Discovery is a major eight-year statewide initiative involving 49 Connecticut communities and over a dozen organizational partners. The Initiative, which focuses on young children from birth through age eight, is focused on the following objectives at the community and state levels:

• Expand the supply of high quality early care and education
• Increase the quality of existing early care and education
• Build strong connections between early care and elementary education
• Improve social, emotional, and academic outcomes for young children

Discovery communities have been charged with developing collaborative groups to build and implement a local early care and education agenda. In addition, the Memorial Fund has requested that Discovery communities engage parents in the planning, participation, and implementation of these local agenda. The Memorial Fund provides annual grants, and a range of technical assistance and knowledge development supports to the communities. In addition to the support of the Discovery communities, the Memorial Fund also funds over a dozen organizations with the objective of developing a statewide and regional network that supports the local communities and seeks state level change in policy and practice. These partner organizations provide a wide range of expertise, including communications, policy research, advocacy and civic engagement resources.

CAPD partnered with the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning and OnPoint Consulting in 2005 for the first phase of the evaluation and with OnPoint Consulting in subsequent years. The evaluation has used a wide array of data sources to document and assess the Discovery Initiative in communities and at the state-level. These have included applications and reports from community and statewide organization grantees; surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups with representatives of these grantees; interviews with other stakeholders and interested observers in Connecticut; electronic messages from the Discovery listserv; observations of training and technical assistance sessions; and interviews with Memorial Fund staff and consultants. The evaluation uses the Initiative's theory of change as its framework and seeks to document and analyze community and state infrastructure and capacities to pursue the "legacy goal" defined in the Discovery theory of change: "sustained community and state-wide focus on early childhood issues, and capacity to influence policy." The guiding questions for the evaluation are:

• Are the Discovery communities developing what is needed to sustain their work going forward?
• Is the foundation for ongoing state-level policy work becoming stronger?
• Are the state-level policy work and the community work together building the foundation for sustained change?
• How are the Initiative's design and the supports it provides to communities and to statewide and other organizations contributing to the development of community and state infrastructure and capacities?