“So What?” – Your Weekly Guide to Advocacy With Impact
Lovingly selected and lightly snarked by Team APEP: David Devlin-Foltz, Susanna Dilliplane, and Christine Ferris
Aspen Evaluation Breakfast- Wrapped Up To Go:
Last week’s Aspen Evaluation Breakfast with Daniel Stid, director of the Madison Initiative at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, was worth the early rise on a chilly morning. For those geographically or chronologically challenged, we offer this video and these updated versions of Daniel’s slides and remarks.
He paints a challenging picture of increasing polarization in Congress that mirrors increasing hostility between registered members of both political parties. But true to APEP’s snarky spirit, it’s a message delivered with humor – and scenes of barroom brawls. And true to Daniel’s intellectual rigor, this version includes links to sources and resources drawn from the literature and from some of the Initiative’s grantees studying opportunities to move policy forward in this challenging environment.
True to our evaluation focus, we also heard from Tanya Beer and Julia Coffman of the Center for Evaluation Innovation about the implications for evaluators of this changing political context. Implementing the Affordable Care Act in states with Republican-dominated statehouses is tough. That’s why this new brief from ORS for the Center on understanding and assessing policy implementation is worth highlighting again.
Never Stop Learning
Check out this thoughtful essay from Kristen Grimm – it’s inspiring, even to snark-mongers. And we’re honored to get a shout-out as a place to do some learning. May it be so.
The Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program helps leading foundations and nonprofit organizations plan, assess and learn from their efforts to promote changes in knowledge, attitudes, behaviors and policies in the US and internationally. To learn more about our tools and services, visit http://www.aspeninstitute.org/apep.
