Understanding and sharing our results is a critical component of the BYI. The BYI created an evaluation team that consists of contracted evaluators, the CWC and an evaluation community fellow team to provide objective evaluation for the Backyard”'s resident engagement activities. The Evaluation team worked with the Community”'s Commission to develop a strength-based approach to monitoring and evaluating CHAT health promotion projects. The majority of the work has focused on helping residents develop their own tools for collecting information and understanding their work. A year-end template was developed in conjunction with the Assessment Team and Commission to allow CHATs to report their progress and challenges.
The evaluation team also completed a review of several hundred articles in the fields of community building and mobilization for health promotion. The review demonstrated that the BYI is unique among national health improvement projects because in the BYI, the needs assessment, planning and action are generated by the community so that the community is the agent, rather than the target of change. The findings of the review and the foundation year activities have led to the development of a very comprehensive and ambitious evaluation plan for 2012 that will assess how well the partnership idea between Allina and the community is working, the progress of empowering residents to build capacity for health promotion, and the impact of this capacity for actually creating positive health benefits for residents.
