Community of Practice

Please join MNEA's Community of Practice (CoP), a bi-monthly virtual event prioritizing knowledge sharing, problem solving, innovation, and collective growth.

This month, Jenna Sethi and Clare Eisenberg will lead discussion on Purposeful Youth-centered Evaluation: Building Youth Evaluation Teams.

As program evaluators, we often ask young people to share their knowledge and experiences, but much less often invite them to be part of the design, data collection, and analysis processes. Partnering with young people throughout the evaluation process not only adds to the richness of the overall evaluation, it provides an opportunity for young people to build useful skills, amplify their voices, and see themselves as leaders. Creating a scaffolded process for young people to build these skills takes intentionality and an adaptive approach. In this webinar, presenters from Informed Change will share their structured yet creative process for building youth evaluation teams with examples from several of their projects. Presenters will also share ideas for activities evaluators and practitioners can do to engage young people with data and purposefully bring them into the evaluation process. 

Jenna Sethi, M.Ed., Ph.D.

Jenna Sethi is the Founder of Informed Change, a research and evaluation firm dedicated to helping youth-serving organizations tell their story of impact and use data for innovation. Prior to founding Informed Change, she spent six years designing and conducting youth development research and evaluation at Search Institute. Jenna has been designing and conducting applied qualitative and mixed-methods research and evaluation centering young people’s voices for over 15 years. She has a Master’s of Education in Youth Development Leadership and a Ph.D. in Education with an emphasis on Family, Youth, and Community. In addition, Jenna has been on the faculty of the Youth Studies program at the University of Minnesota for over ten years.

Clare Eisenberg, M.Ed., Senior Consultant

Clare Eisenberg is a researcher, educator, and communicator. Her work prioritizes building agency, voice, and creativity through the lenses of critical theory and social justice. She has extensive experience designing and conducting qualitative research, managing and evaluating youth out-of-school-time programming, and in nonprofit development and communications. Clare earned her B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Lewis & Clark College and her M.Ed. in Youth Development Leadership from the University of Minnesota.

The MNEA CoP meeting structure is designed to be flexible in order to meet attendee needs and busy schedules. Attend sessions if you want to connect regularly or just want to pop in here and there. All are welcome!

We look forward to seeing you!

Cost of the event: Free for members, $5 for non-members

If you need any accommodations to participate, please let us know at least one week prior to the event. Thank you.