ACET, Inc. Blog

The Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul is hosting a conversation about and book showing of HMONG AMERICA: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora, written by Dr. Chia Youyee Vang, on Wednesday, April 27. Dr. Vang will reflect on the importance of Hmong Americans producing knowledge about Hmong history, culture and traditions. Her book will also be available for purchase for $25.00. A book signing will follow Dr. Vang’s talk.

Dr. Vang is currently an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. ACET has consulted with Dr. Vang on various projects for over 10 years.

Event details:

Wednesday, April 27, 5 pm – 7 pm
Buenger Education Center
Concordia University, St. Paul
275 North Syndicate Street
St. Paul, MN 55104

ACET will be attending the 2011 Public Affairs Student Association (PASA) Career Engagement Fair on Feb. 24 at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. We would love to talk with interested parties about our company and the field of evaluation. We will also be prescreening for positions at the fair. If you’re a graduate student or alumnus interested in a career in research and evaluation, please find our table – we would love to talk to you!

Cassie

Kirsten and I had a great time at the 2010 American Evaluation Association (AEA) conference last week in San Antonio, Texas! We attended over a dozen sessions that provided valuable tips for our profession. We were also excited to co-present two sessions that highlighted a couple of our clients: the Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE) and The Wayside House, Inc.

Kathy Hill from OHE discussed the process used to develop a cost-analysis framework for their GEAR UP program while I reviewed the initial findings of this program on academic outcomes (see Multipaper session 763).  Heather Scholz from Wayside House co-presented with Kirsten on the lessons learned implementing mixed-methods and multiple measures in a quality human services evaluation (see Multipaper session 798).

Our winter e-newsletter will feature key takeaways from each session, so stay tuned for that! To subscribe to the e-newsletter, please email our Office Manager, Cassie, at cassie@acetinc.com.

Stella

As you may know, Stella and Kirsten will be making presentations at the American Evaluation Association (AEA) 2010 conference this Saturday. ACET just posted two PowerPoint presentations on AEA’s website in preparation for the conference.

Multipaper Session #798: Evaluating a Child-Welfare Demonstration Program: Evolution, Considerations, and Lessons Learned
Multipaper Session #763: The Impact of Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) on Student Academic Preparedness

The presentations posted in the AEA eLibrary system are open to the public, so please feel free to check it out! To see all presentations posted for the AEA conference, please click here: http://comm.eval.org/EVAL/EVAL/Resources/LibraryDocuments/Default.aspx?LibraryKey=1eff4fd7-afa0-42e1-b275-f65881b7489b

If you have any questions or would like more information, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact us!

Joseph, my husband Jason and I recently joined Bolder Options on a staff boating event on Lake Minnetonka. Bolder Options is a nonprofit organization devoted to improve the lives of youth. The outing was a great opportunity for Bolder Options staff to celebrate all the hard work and achievements in matching mentors and mentees and in coordinating youth meetings and activities to help youth set and achieve goals. ACET has provided evaluation services for Bolder Options for over five years and we were excited to be a part of their celebration! Below are a couple of pictures from the event. What does your organization do to celebrate achievements?

Stella

Each year the American Evaluation Association (AEA) holds an annual conference at which evaluators from around the country gather to discuss and reflect on evaluations. A large portion of the conference is devoted to evaluators sharing their knowledge with others through poster presentations, round-tables, and paper presentations. And being a presenter at AEA’s conference is a competitive process: Evaluators submit short briefs of their proposed topic which are reviewed and rated by AEA members.

Recently ACET staff learned that two of their proposals were accepted for the November, 2010 conference in San Antonio. Kirsten will be presenting a paper on the evaluation of a Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) grant currently implemented by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education. The presentation will emphasize the initial findings of the impact of GEAR UP on student academic success, review evaluation successes and challenges, and describe lessons learned. Stella will also co-present a paper on Incarnation Family Connections, a child welfare demonstration program implemented by The Wayside House. This presentation will summarize findings from the first six months of the program, the evolution of the evaluation design, considerations made in selecting the final design, and lessons learned.

We don’t often get a chance to share our personal interests and passions with our clients, so you may not know how crazy we all are about animals (both domesticated and wild). Many of us have pets and are always swapping stories about them and their antics. Our desks and computer desktops are littered with pictures of our happy critters. The office itself even houses 3 Betta fish (Junior, Thor, and Snidely) and one Red-Eared Slider turtle (Pee Wee, or “PW”).

In an effort to engage our passion for animals outside of the office and in the community, ACET, Inc. has formed a local corporate team to participate in the Animal Humane Society’s Walk for Animals. We have titled the team “HAWT” (Helping All Wagging Tails). Kirsten’s husband, Zack, is designing t-shirts for us to wear on the five-mile walk on May 1.

Please consider joining team HAWT on the walk or making a tax-deductible donation for this cause. All proceeds go to the Animal Humane Society to help animals in need. For example, $50 in donations will pay for two stray cats to receive full vaccinations or $500 in donations can help three dogs through the Adoption Preparation program, which readies shy or fearful dogs for adoption.

To learn more about the Walk for Animals, join the team and raise funds, or make a tax-deductible donation, simply follow this link: http://events.animalhumanesociety.org/site/TR/Walk/General?team_id=9840&pg=team&fr_id=1110

If you can’t be directly involved, you can still help out by forwarding our team’s link onto anyone who might be interested in helping a great cause.

Thank you in advance for your support of this very worthy cause.

Heather

P.S. Stay tuned for a blog report on the walk and pictures from the event!

ACET offered its second community workshop, “The Results Are In,” on February 23^rd and would like to extend a word of thanks to all who attended. We highly appreciated the excellent attention, questions, and devotion to the material. The workshop, facilitated by ACET’s Evaluation Specialist, Joseph Curiel, shared a bit of knowledge on common types of survey data and how various types of data are related to analysis options. The workshop also provided participants with various options for graphically reporting data and several tips and tricks for making your visual displays both easy to understand and visually appealing.

The workshop was the second in a series of free community workshops ACET plans to facilitate in order to help organizations build their evaluation capacity. Be sure to subscribe to our blog to keep updated on future events and email Heather Scholz (heather@acetinc.com) if you are interested in attending future workshops or have suggestions for future workshops topics.

Last August Heather and Kirsten offered a free workshop on survey design, which covered how to write useful items for your survey and common pitfalls to avoid. The feedback on the workshop was very positive and all attendees seemed to benefit from the material. ACET also offered a complementary review of an attendees’ existing survey as a means of following-up for the event.

We are pleased to announce that our second workshop has been scheduled! The Results are In: Analyzing and Reporting Survey Data for Stakeholders will cover common options for analysis of your survey data, guide you through the analysis process, and offer you suggestions for sharing your information with stakeholders in a way that is useful and meaningful.

The Results are In: Analyzing and Reporting Survey Data for Stakeholders will be held on:

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 from 1:00 to 3:00 pm at the
Neighborhood House Wellstone Center
179 Robie Street East, Saint Paul, MN 55107
Wellstone Center phone: (651) 789-2542

Seats are limited to this FREE event so please RSVP to Heather Scholz via email at heather@acetinc.com or via phone at the number below by Thursday, February 18th, 2010. For more information about ACET please visit our website at www.acetinc.com or contact our office at 952-922-1811.