We worked with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Colorado to assess immigrant, volunteer and partner perspectives on AFSC’s efficacy in supporting the Colorado immigrant rights movement. Our participatory methods and values were in direct alignment with AFSC’s goal to lead from behind. We surprised AFSC staff by discovering that their impact extended outside of Colorado. We provided a brief training in participatory methods so they could implement participatory internal evaluation with a limited budget.

We studied the impact of a downtown street redesign project on businesses in a small community in Minnesota for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. We tracked the impact of the project on sales, employment and overall economic health of the community before, during and after project completion. Services included interviews and surveys of local business leaders to assess their perceptions of the project and to collect business-specific workforce data. Our study was the first to demonstrate positive impact of street redesign in a rural town and was used to show other communities considering pedestrian-friendly redesign that this approach will be a win-win for pedestrians, bicyclists and local businesses.

We conducted a cost-effectiveness study of a program designed to reduce health care utilization costs for uninsured high care utilizers in the Denver, Colorado region. We found that connecting high health care utilizers to a primary care provider significantly reduced their utilization of emergency services for non-emergency needs. The program further succeeded in linking the majority of participants to health insurance. We created several models for extending and expanding the model to improve patient’s health care access while also reducing costs to health care providers who provide safety net health care services.

We assessed the impact of NRPA’s CDC-funded ACHIEVE program promoting policy and environmental change supporting worksite wellness, increased physical activity, improved nutrition, and reduced tobacco consumption nationwide. We provided technical assistance to communities in developing their action plans, helped communities identify appropriate indicators of success, designed an overarching evaluation of the nationwide impact of ACHIEVE across all communities, and wrote articles about ACHIEVE successes for the NRPA magazine.

We documented the successes and challenges of federal and state agency collaborative efforts to implement universal newborn hearing screening. The information was used to identify stakeholders that needed to be included in discussions and decision making.

We partnered with H Gill Peach & Associates to assess the efficacy of subsidized weatherization measures and energy bill assistance in reducing energy usage, energy bills, and helping low-income households to avoid non-payment related electric or gas shut-offs. Our annual reports across nine years were used to ensure that administrative processes were efficient so that the most funds possible could directly help low-income families, particularly those impacted by recession. We also helped the State of Nevada identify specific populations whose access to services declined after a shift in policy, so that these households could be targeted to re-apply for benefits.