Projects

Evaluation of the Thriving Rural Communities and Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities Initiative

The Thriving Rural Communities and Thriving Hispanic/Latino Communities Initiative is a six-year partnership of Duke Divinity School, The Duke Endowment, and the North Carolina and Western North Carolina Annual Conferences of the United Methodist Church. Its goals are to form effective clergy leaders in mission with rural churches, congregations and communities and in mission with people of Hispanic/Latino/a backgrounds through a variety of activities and supports within Duke Divinity School, in communities and in connection with thriving churches and leaders of those churches. (http://www.divinity.duke.edu/programs/trc/)

CAPD has been working to evaluate the initiative's success in achieving these goals. As part of that work, CAPD helped the program partners more fully articulate their theory of change and intended outcomes; visited thriving rural churches to learn more about what they share and what makes them unique; interviewed stakeholders at each institution; conducted a survey of all United Methodist clergy in North Carolina. Some of the data from these activities is being used to develop a reflection and assessment tool that the Duke Endowment and churches and congregations can use to better understand what factors contribute to thriving, as experienced by rural churches and those in Hispanic/Latino ministry, and to document their own progress towards those aspects important to them. In later years of the evaluation, work will turn more towards documenting initiative outcomes for key stakeholder groups: clergy, congregations and the stakeholder institutions.