Graduation keynote for YMCA Training Inc

I was asked to deliver a keynote address at the graduation of YMCA Training Inc’s 132nd cycle. The YMCA Training, Inc. program is an intensive 20-week, full-time computerized office skills training and employment program. Designed to replicate the expectations of a professional office environment, the training prepares participants with both the technical and job readiness skills to succeed. Here is what I said to the graduates.

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What can go wrong? Racial equity, dataviz, & deficit thinking

In 2019, Pieta published a blog post on data visualization that was consistent with targeted universalism. Jonathan Schwabish and Alice Feng at Urban Institute picked up on that post and cited it in their own “Do No Harm” guide. Eli found that work and was interested in applying it to his own design practice, developing…

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Measuring quality, quantity, and results

One of the risks when developing an evaluation plan, is developing measures without being really clear about what kind of measure they are or how we’re going to use them to understand our program. In this post, I’m going to talk about process measures (AKA outputs) and outcome measures — how they are different from each other and how they are both useful in understanding a program.

When evaluating your programs, you may want to consider two kinds of measures: process measures and outcome measures. Process measures help you assess what you’re doing and how well you’re doing it, and they are evaluated while the program is in progress. Outcome measures evaluate the effect the program has/had on its target population (its impact), and they can be assessed during or after the program is complete. 

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Evaluation FAQs

Managing your evaluation plans internally can be complicated. Trying to design the evaluation plan that best represents your work without disrupting the work is crucial and challenging. There are a few questions that clients have asked me over and over. Here, I address some of those frequently asked questions. Why is my funder asking for…

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Measuring SES series: Income, need, and living wages

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post on socio-economic status (SES). SES is usually understood to be a combination of three things: income, education, and occupation. There are multiple reasons why we might ask such as establishing need, making sure that we are reaching the population that needs our services, or making sure…

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Measuring socio-economic status

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on gathering race and ethnicity data on a survey or form. One of my readers commented that socio-economic status (SES) was also important and related. A very good point. SES intersects with other social constructs such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and…

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Race and ethnicity: Collecting demographic data in a survey

There are multiple reasons why you might want to collect race/ethnic data on a survey and each of those reasons will have different implications for what you ask and how. In this post, I will clarify the different purposes that might be served by asking about race/ethnicity and provide some suggestions for creating a question…

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