Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Hello fellow evaluators! My name is
Ann Price and I am President of
Community Evaluation Solutions (CES), based in Georgia. This year’s conference theme,
Paths to the Future of Evaluation: Contribution, Leadership, Renewal resonates with me. I am often called upon to speak with evaluation classes and frequently meet with evaluators considering consulting as a profession.
CES is a small business and I have come to depend on young evaluators to meet the demands of our work. For the past four years, we have employed a full-time research associate. We employ an intern or practicum student (yes, I pay them!), typically in the summer or fall.
Lessons Learned: It’s a win – win really. I truly enjoy mentoring early career evaluators and community psychologists. My early career employees get training and a great place to start their career. I typically send my RA and intern to the Summer Institute. They also get training in SPSS, qualitative data analysis, Excel, and data visualization and other skills. They work hard but at a pace that builds their confidence. For my part, I get help meeting my clients’ and inspiration from their ideas. I derive satisfaction from the knowledge that I helped launch their careers. My past RA’s and students are successful in their current positions. One is in healthcare evaluation, one has a great public health fellowship, one works for Delta doing data analytics, one just got her Master’s in School Psychology, and our last RA, Emily, just entered physical therapy school. Here is Emily’s
blog post about her experience at CES.
The hardest part for me of cour
About AEA
The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEA’s mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org.