Who We Are
CAPD History
The Center for Assessment and Policy Development (CAPD) was established in 1988 as a non-profit organization by Wendy Wolf, Bernard McMullan and Sally Leiderman. Sally Leiderman and Sam Stephens are the current senior leaders.
The organization was founded to improve outcomes for children, families and neighborhoods by helping to build the capacity of institutions, systems, communities, intermediary organizations and foundations that do the day to day work on their behalf. For the past 18 years, we have partnered with these groups to assess the progress, quality and effectiveness of their work; to plan, design and implement system, community change and related initiatives; and to create websites, ‘think pieces’ and other resources to share lessons and tools based on our experience and expertise.
CAPD’s original focus was on work that improves children, adolescent and family health, well-being and school success. With national and regional foundations, we helped to craft and implement major children’s initiatives at the national, state and local levels. We also evaluated a number of family support, school-readiness and school reform initiatives. Over time, our work expanded to include design, planning and/or evaluation support to myriad comprehensive community building, leadership, anti-racism and campus/community partnership initiatives. We also continue to design, implement and/or evaluate efforts aimed at improving child and adolescent health, well-being and school success.
The groups with which we work and our colleagues in the field have been generous in allowing us to learn a great deal about the trade-offs, tensions and challenges of our collective work. They have also provided opportunities for us to expand our thinking and skills around, for example, the use of theory of change evaluations; ways to engage various constituencies in difficult system and community change efforts; and story-telling as a valuable method for data collection and for making meaning of information and other traditional and non-traditional approaches to our work. In large part because of this breadth of experience, CAPD staff is regularly asked to advise foundations, governments, provider organizations and community groups on best practices in evaluation, implementation of major change efforts (planning, collaboration, governance, leadership development) and use of data to guide decision-making.
In addition, many of our partners have helped us understand the role that white privilege and racism play in the outcomes experienced by children and families of color, particularly in the communities, reservations and neighborhoods that are often the places where we work. In the past ten years, we have put more and more focus on doing our work through a lens that acknowledges and seeks explicitly to reduce the effects of white privilege and racism. Most recently, CAPD has contributed some resources to help others who are also working in this way, including Evaluation Tools for Racial Equity and Flipping the Script – White Privilege and Community Building, both with MP Associates, Inc.
Principal Staff
SALLY H. LEIDERMAN, President, is one of CAPD's founders, and has been central to its development since it began. Her expertise spans traditional and non-traditional evaluation design and implementation, with a focus on helping to build the evaluation capacity of the groups whose work she is evaluating; leadership development, anti-racism work and system change, including transformation of large public system, school districts and schools and community initiatives. In the last few years, Ms. Leiderman has led evaluations of The Duke/Durham Neighborhood Partnership; a partnership between Duke University and 12 neighborhoods surrounding its campus; The Common Ground Fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, which supports efforts to improve outcomes for people of color, including immigrants and refugees, in the greater Washington, D.C. area.; The Children First Initiative, a partnership between the Graustein Memorial Fund and seven communities in Connecticut over seven years to improve outcomes for children 0-8 via parent engagement and system collaboration; Project Change, a ten year anti-racism initiative that began as a partnership between four communities and the Levi Strauss Foundation now housed at the Tides Center. She is also completing evaluations of the Non-Profit Forum in New Haven; Healing the Heart of Diversity and the Americans for Indian Opportunity Ambassadors Program, three different values-based leadership development/personal transformation efforts that incorporate explicit attention to issues of power, oppression, privilege and racism. She recently contributed a chapter on evaluating personal transformation leadership efforts to the Leadership Evaluation Handbook, to be published by Jossey-Bass in fall, 2006.
With MP Associates, Ms. Leiderman recently completed a monograph on white privilege in community building work – Flipping the Script – which has been widely circulated and well received. She also completed a monograph on community perspectives of campus/community partnerships in partnership with Andrew Furco, director of the Service-Learning Research & Development Center at the University of California – Berkeley, in which issues of privilege and parity are brought to the fore for academic audiences. This work was completed as part of an evaluation Ms. Leiderman and Dr. Furco completed of the Engaging Communities and Campuses Initiative of the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education division of the Council of Independent Colleges. Ms. Leiderman also partnered in the development of "Training for Racial Equity and Inclusion: A Guide to Selected Programs" with the Alliance for Conflict Transformation, the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families and Project Change, and co-authored "A Community Builder's Toolkit: 15 Tools for Creating Healthy, Productive Interracial/Multicultural Communities," with the Institute for Democratic Renewal and Project Change.
With her colleagues Sam Stephens, Maggie Potapchuk and Matthew Leiderman, she also developed and is now in the process of expanding a website – Evaluation Tools for Racial Equity – designed to help community groups and others self-evaluate their progress toward antiracism and inclusion goals.
Ms. Leiderman also serves as an advisor to foundations in the areas of antiracism work, design of community/foundation partnerships and initiatives to improve community outcomes, with explicit attention to power, privilege, oppression and racism, and on the component parts of these efforts – strategies to support communities that want to improve outcomes for children, families and neighborhoods, civic engagement, resident leadership, outcome identification, logic models and theories of change, capacity building and personal and institutional change strategies.
S. A. STEPHENS, Ph.D., Vice President, has more than 25 years experience in policy research and evaluation. Dr. Stephens has directed and been principal investigator on a number of projects related to improving the outcomes of children, youth and families, particularly low-income families and children of color, through organizational and systems change. Current and recent projects in this area include evaluations of a 49-community multi-year initiative in Connecticut, of a multi-grant multi-year early education system change initiative in New York City, and of the 21st Century Community Learning Center initiative in a community in rural Minnesota. Previously, he was project director for the School-Based Initiative for Adolescent Parents and Their Young Children and for evaluations of family support centers in Maryland and Philadelphia. He has worked with state and city governments and with community groups and organizations to develop indicators and tracking systems for child and family outcomes, including those related to early child development, school readiness, and school achievement. He regularly provides strategic planning and assessment consultation using a theory-of-change approach to foundations, service provider organizations, and community-based collaborative groups. Before joining CAPD, Dr. Stephens was Senior Survey Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, where he specialized in evaluation design, methodology, and survey techniques.
Board of Directors
SALLY H. LEIDERMAN [see bio above]
MILTON J. LITTLE, Jr. succeeded Mark O'Connell as the president of United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta. Mr. Little was previously the president and chief executive officer of United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley. He earned a B.A. degree from Morehouse College, an M.A. degree from Columbia University and also studied at New York University. His 25-year career spans the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Prior to United Way of Massachusetts Bay, Mr. Little served in executive leadership positions at the National Urban League in New York, Lucent Technologies and AT&T.
FRANCES G. PADILA is currently serving as the Vice President for Program, Policy and Administration at the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut. She has had extensive experience in Connecticut's non-profit sector, both within foundations and as an independent consultant. Ms. Padilla has earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University, and a M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
RABBI SHIRA STUTMAN currently serves as both the Rabbi and Executive Director of Kesher Shalom Synagogue in Abington, PA. in addition to working with the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia as a Senior Leadership Development Association. She has a strong background in organizing and supporting progressive social action in the Jewish communities of both the San Francisco and Philadelphia areas. Rabbi Stutman obtained her Rabbinical training at the Reconstuctionist Rabinical College and her B.A. from Columbia College at Columbia University.
S. A. STEPHENS, Ph.D. [see bio above]
