Foundation Viewpoints:

Historically, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has made a commitment to program evaluation as an important tool to enhance program design, implementation, and the documentation of outcomes and impact. Recently, we brought the functions of evaluation, public policy, communications, and technology into a more coordinated alignment to increase the potential impact of our program investment. This integrated approach will also be helpful in designing programs that can best communicate system change efforts at the community level to audiences such as state and national policy makers. Designing evaluations so that they yield useful information that can reach external audiences presents a unique set of challenges. Evaluation of Turning Point confronts some of these challenges.

Partnerships Are Central to Developing Effective Approaches

Turning Point partnerships are engaged in a dynamic and complex set of interactions to change relationships, communication mechanisms, attitudes, behaviors, and structures. This applies across a broad array of organizations, constituencies, professionals, and leaders. In her article "Transforming Public Health Through Policy" (Transformations, March 1998), Terri Wright put forth that partnerships will undoubtedly uncover the need for a course of action, guiding principles, and procedures considered to be advantageous and expedient to creating and sustaining their vision.

While the Turning Point partnerships will produce a written plan, the plan itself will only reflect a part of the story. Partnerships are central to developing more effective approaches to solve public health problems and enhancing public health capacity building. Collectively, the Turning Point partnerships are a national laboratory in which lessons from partnership formation, planning, and action can be systematically extracted and translated for different audiences. Each partnership contributes in different ways at different times to collective knowledge-building.

Policy-Oriented Evaluations

One function of "policy oriented" evaluation is to translate what is learned about community work and partnership efforts into presentations that show how the work is relevant to the people and organizations who can influence a policy agenda that is actionable within their jurisdictions. Policy audiences need information that includes data to convey the magnitude of any effort as well as its resulting impact; description to convey a picture of the activity and its impact; and stories to convey texture and feelings. In the context of the Turning Point initiative, providing information that can be incorporated into decision and policy discussions in real time is only possible when the many participants in partnerships are willing to contribute their insights on a regular basis.

Turning Point Is a National Learning Laboratory

The national evaluation of Turning Point has now conducted three rounds of interviews with partnership participants and will continue interviews on a quarterly schedule. The Lewin Group presented its findings to the entire Turning Point  cohort at the Forum in Phoenix. In addition, The Lewin Group conducted workshops that introduced tools that can be used in the field to self-assess partnerships and systems change efforts. Findings at this stage are a form of feedback to the Turning Point participants, intended to frame cross-cutting themes, link partnerships around shared concerns, and introduce common language about potential outcomes emerging from the work of partnerships.

Turning Point offers a unique learning opportunity that can help to shape a more responsive and effective public health system for the 21st Century. We have designed an evaluation approach that is intended to be comprehensive in capturing the voices and insights of stakeholders at all levels - from the community to state and local governments. One objective is to inform what partnership models work best for attaining this. The success of the integrated evaluation, policy, and communications approach to capturing voices and insights, and assessing the strengths, potential, and partnerships for systems change will be dependent on our collective efforts.

Ricardo Millet is Director of Evaluation at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This is the third article in a series of articles from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. The Lewin Group, Inc. is funded jointly by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to evaluate the Turning Point initiative.