Projects

Evaluation and Technical Assistance to the Communities for All Ages Initiative

Communities for All Ages is a national initiative of the Intergenerational Center of Temple University. Its goal is to contribute to creating communities that are good places for children, families, adults and older adults to live. With funding from the Kellogg Foundation and others, the Intergenerational Center is partnering with eight community foundations and 24 communities to improve outcomes for children, families, adults and older adults via a particular lens and framework. At the community level, the initiative is designed and implemented by an intergenerational team of community residents and organizational and system stakeholders. They complete an assessment and planning phase to identify an issue of importance to people of all ages in their community that will be the starting place for their Communities for All Ages work. They complete action plans and a logic model to identify two year and ten year plus outcomes in two areas: improved well-being of children, families, adults and older adults and increased capacity of organizations and residents of all ages to use an intergenerational lens, framework and strategies to address community issues. The national network of Communities for All Ages sites in 2009 includes communities in Arizona, New York, Mississippi and Michigan. An additional 8 communities in 4 states are expected to join the initiative in January 2009.

CAPD is currently in the midst of a three year evaluation of the Communities for All Ages initiative. For that effort, we helped the Intergenerational Center articulate its theory of change and a logic model, provided tools for community assessments and planning, provided training to the Intergenerational Support and with the Center, to communities in Arizona, Mississippi and Michigan on site and via webinars. Two tools/approaches have been developed especially for this work - one is a logic model reporting form that allows communities to take a generic logic model tailored to the expected short and longer term outcomes of Communities for All Ages, customize the outcomes for their particular issue area and contribution to that issue, report progress against those customized outcomes and describe the evidence they are using to assess that progress. This tool will support the evaluation needs of each community and provide data for cross-site analysis. In addition, we identified a social capital tool developed through University of Minnesota Extension. The Intergenerational Center has contracted with UMnE to allow CAPD and the Communities for All Ages sites to test the use of that tool to collect baseline and follow-up information about levels of bonding, bridging and linking trust and engagement - as one way to measure increased community capacity, reduced isolation and improved social capital.