Melanie Ogleton, MHSA, Center on AIDS and Community Health, Academy for Educational Development, 1825 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20009, 202-884-8764, mogleton@aed.org and Susan Rogers, PhD, Academy for Educational Development (AED), 100 Fifth Ave., 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10011.

Issues: CBOs need to understand how to evaluate their programs.

Description: The Greater Newark AIDS Initiative (GNAI), funded by the Prudential Foundation, provides resources to twelve organizations in the Newark, NJ area to provide HIV prevention services.

AED developed an evaluation tool box that included: a) A readiness tool that queried grantees about their attitudes toward evaluation and their level of knowledge and skills; b) Training resources on the program logic model, performance indicators, and goals and objectives; c) Accessible internet-based evaluation resources; and d) A continuum assessment tool to measure grantees’ evaluation progress and need for additional help.

Lessons Learned: Program staff are eager to learn evaluation skills but confront several barriers-

Organizations oftentimes do not have the internal capacity to evaluate programs nor the resources to outsource; Staff often don’t have access to practical evaluation resources and are overwhelmed with the abundance of forms and other data collection methods; and Staff ability to analyze and interpret data results is sometimes limited.

Recommendations: Staff’s evaluation readiness and perceptions of evaluation should be assessed using a simple survey and informal discussions and they should be involved in evaluation planning upfront to ensure that the design is appropriate and within the range of organizational capacity.

Learning Objectives: