A good breakfast starts with TOAST

Our team recently got back from the annual American Evaluation Association's conference in Minneapolis, MN.  AEA is the premier conference for evaluators and methodologists who work in the social and governmental sectors to share their recent innovations, results, and lessons learned. Like all great conference, the action happens both inside and outside of the sessions.  We have many more comment and reflections, but we first wanted to share some work that we presented on the SCALE initiative.  

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There was a ton of data that we collected during 100MLives SCALE.  Potentially too much.  Because of this, we needed an effective and efficient method to synthesize across all communities.  Further,  SCALE was a hybrid participatory and empowerment evaluation.  A core aspect (if not the core aspect) of empowerment evaluation is having stakeholders learn the skills to create, document, and tell their own narrative.

Enter  TOAST.  Telling Our Amazing Stories Together.  Led by the implementation and improvement polymath Rohit Ramaswamy, TOAST is an staged ethnographic method that helps us pull together different data sources and threads to help create a coherent narrative. 

Check out our poster on TOAST at this link.  

​We are current working on a manuscript on this process and are exploring how the general principles can be applied in similar complex settings. Expect this sometime first quarter next year.

Also, be sure to learn more about 100 Million at 100MLives.org