Over the past two decades, there has been consistent interest in Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB) and a pressing need to respond to the calls for building evaluation capacity in individuals and organizations. This interactive workshop will introduce ECB as a similar but distinct practice from evaluation. At the end of this three-hour session, participants will be able to define individual and organizational ECB, use various instruments to measure evaluation capacity in organizations, design an ECB intervention that can be implemented in their organization, and highlight the intended outcomes of ECB interventions. Participants will also have the opportunity to strengthen their own evaluation capacity builder competencies.
About the workshop facilitators:
Leslie Fierro, Ph.D., joined the Max Bell School of Public Policy (MBSPP) in 2021 where she teaches program evaluation in the Masters of Public Policy Program as well as across other graduate offerings at McGill University. She has published research on ECB and related topics (i.e., evaluation policy, evaluative thinking) within evaluation journals (Fierro & Christie, 2017; Fierro et al., 2018; Fierro, Kinarsky, Echeverria-Estrada, & Christie, 2022; Bourgeois, Lemire, Fierro, Castleman, Cho, 2023, Fierro & Bourgeois, forthcoming), and has delivered several trainings on the topic through The Evaluators’ Institute (TEI) and other professional forums (e.g., evaluation roundtable for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). In addition, Leslie consistently engages with organizations to develop materials central to strengthening evaluation capacity; this most recently includes serving as the lead consultant to refresh CDC’s Framework for Program Evaluation in Public Health. She is an active member of both the American Evaluation Association (Co Editor-in-Chief of New Directions for Evaluation, 2017-2023, current member of the Evaluation Policy Task Force) and the Canadian Evaluation Society (current Associate Editor, English language articles).
Isabelle Bourgeois, Ph.D., is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa. Her ongoing research work focuses on measuring and building organizational evaluation capacity (EC) in the public and community sectors. She has published extensively on EC and ECB over the past two decades; her most notable contributions include defining and measuring organizational evaluation capacity in various sectors (e.g., Bourgeois & Cousins, 2013; Bourgeois et al., 2013; Bourgeois, Simmons, & Buetti, 2018; Laubek & Bourgeois, 2024); producing knowledge syntheses on ECB (Bourgeois et al., 2023; Fierro & Bourgeois, 2024; Nielsen et al., 2023); developing evaluator and ECB competencies (Buetti, Bourgeois, & Jafary, 2023; Kallemeyn, Bourgeois, & Ensminger, 2021), and investigating evaluation policy and practice in government organizations (Bourgeois & Maltais, 2022a, 2022b; Bourgeois & Leblanc, 2019). Her research and scholarship on ECB have been recognized by the evaluation and public administration communities in several ways; in 2017, she received the Karl-Boudreault Award for Leadership in Evaluation from the National Capital Chapter of the Canadian Evaluation Society; in 2021, she received the Parenteau Award for best French-language article published in Canadian Public Administration; and in 2024, she received the Contribution to Evaluation Award from the Canadian Evaluation Society.