By Maryfrances Porter, Associate Director for Program Evaluation and Community Consultation at Youth-Nex

Related posts will be available under Community

The YN Program Evaluation and Community Consultation arm of Youth-Nex has been very busy lately, especially in the area of consultation. Dr. Tolan partnered with Andy Block and Angela Ciolfi to make a presentation to juvenile court judges from around the state regarding what can be done from the bench to best help truant youth.

We then held breakout sessions with the judges where we could talk about truancy in a more information, conversational way and respond to specific questions they had. I gave a presentation at the Center for Non-Profit Excellence on how to use data to information decision making. I am providing an hour of free, one-on-one consultation with participants from youth serving organizations. Next, I’ll be off to Richmond to present at the Juvenile Law and Education conference on ways that juvenile defense attorneys can support getting the youth they work with involved in activities that promote positive youth development. On the evaluation side of things, we also continue to partner with the City of Promise initiative in Charlottesville to help manage community data and gather information about what is important to City of Promise neighbors. The City of Promise website is coming soon – watch this blog for more information. We are also finishing up data collection as part of an evaluation of the UVA Jefferson Public Citizen program. We anticipate having at least some preliminary results by the end of the summer. It’s been a whirlwind of activity this last couple of weeks, and a lot of fun! We’ll be looking for undergraduate research assistants for the Fall!