Project-Level Evaluation

While the national evaluation is beginning to answer questions about JUMP as a whole, each project should still conduct its own internal evaluation to answer questions that are relevant to its operations. Project-level evaluation (or self-evaluation) is a vital component of any social service project. It is especially important for mentoring projects because of the unique nature of mentoring as an intervention. By definition, mentoring relationships are quite personal and vary greatly from one match to another. Similarly, mentoring projects differ widely from one another. Finally, because relatively little mentoring research is available, it is important for projects to integrate ongoing self-evaluation into their activities. Some projects already conduct project-level evaluations because they have staff members who are interested in evaluation results or who have backgrounds in evaluation. However, these projects are the exception. To meet the needs of projects that do not have many evaluation resources, OJJDP developed the JUMP Self-Evaluation Workbook. The workbook is designed to guide mentoring projects of any size and with any level of evaluation experience through the process of creating a project logic model, designing an evaluation based on that model, interpreting data, and using evaluation results. The workbook will be distributed to all JUMP grantees later this year.