YouthPlaces (YP) is an after-school youth development
program serving high-risk youth between the ages of 12-18 years. It is a community rooted program
serving over 6000 youth across 17 program sites housed throughout Allegheny
County.
YP collaborated with the University of Pittsburgh (OCD and
Department of Applied Developmental Psychology) to build a conceptual model of
their operations, also known as a Theory
of Change (TOC). The TOC
developed was a product of three evaluation planning activities: review of past
YP evaluations; research review on setting level features promoting positive
youth development; and interviews of YP staff and youth participants. The resulting TOC provides a
roadmap illustrating why the program offers the activities it does, why the
program is expected to work, and what outcomes are expected as a result of sustained
participation in YP programming.
Having theories, informed both by research and practice,
about the inner workings of YP programming equips the program to test out these
theories through evaluation. Using
the TOC as a framework, existing program data can be dissected to determine
what data is available to inform various aspects of the model and analyzed to
determine what the data says about how well the model is working at both a
system and a site level. These
activities will not only inform every day programming at YP, but can also be
utilized to identify areas for program improvement.