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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 twenty years of accomplishment. Her expertise spans traditional and non-traditional evaluation design and implementation, with a focus on helping to build the evaluation capacity of the groups with whom she works. In the last few years, Ms. Leiderman has led evaluations of the Communities for All Ages Initiative, the Communities Creating Racial Equity Initiative, The Thriving Rural Communities Initiative, The Duke/Durham Neighborhood Partnership, Project Change, The Children First Initiative and many other efforts. She was co-principal investigator, with Andrew Furco, director of the Service-Learning Research and Development Center at the University of California – Berkeley, of the Engaging Communities and Campuses Initiative of the Consortium for the Advancement of Private Higher Education division of the Council of Independent Colleges. She has also designed and led a number of evaluations of leadership development efforts, including the Community Leadership Program of New Haven, Healing the Heart of Diversity and the Americans for Indian Opportunity Ambassadors Program, and contributed a chapter on evaluating values-based and personal transformation leadership development efforts to the Handbook of Leadership Development Evaluation (Jossey-Bass, 2007).
Much of Ms. Leiderman’s recent work concerns evaluation of efforts aimed at reducing institutional racism, supporting racial equity or building more inclusive communities. Ms. Leiderman co-created two websites to support community groups working towards those goals, who wish to avoid some of the privilege or racism that can be embedded in seemingly “race-neutral” evaluation. The websites are: www.racialequitytools.org and www.evaluationtoolsforracialequity.org. She also co-authored a monograph that has been very well-received and widely used, Flipping the Script: White Privilege and Community Building, and is the author of its chapter on evaluation. She co-authored a monograph on community perspectives of campus/community partnerships in which issues of privilege and parity in these relationships are brought to the fore for academic audiences. The research supporting this monograph was done as part of the Engaging Communities and Campuses Initiative evaluation. 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.
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]
