Evaluating Program Sustainability – a rubric to help you plan and measure progress

When funding runs out, how will your program live on? When people move to new roles, how can you keep the momentum of your institutional change work? When seeking new partners to adopt your work, how can you keep them involved and invested? In this workshop session, equity-oriented STEM evaluators will introduce a new qualitative rubric to evaluate the sustainability of initiatives aimed at generating positive institutional change, derived from their experience as the Evaluation Team of the National Science Foundation Eddie Bernice Johnson INCLUDES Aspire Alliance. The Aspire Alliance is a multi-institutional alliance, devoted to faculty diversification, with institutional transformation as a focal point of this work. Imparting insights from this project can help similar initiatives seeking to positively transform institutions, plan to sustain their work, celebrate successes and more effectively meet challenges.

Representatives from the Aspire Alliance Evaluation Team will discuss the stages of sustainability and describe the key dimensions of progress toward program sustainability for initiatives such as the Aspire Alliance. These dimensions were derived from a literature review and include matters related to funding, but also areas that are as critical to success as funding, but may receive less attention or strategic effort: personnel, culture, propagation, information resources, evaluation & learning, and partnerships.

In the workshop, participants will learn about each of these dimensions in detail, hear about lessons learned from evaluating the Aspire Alliance, and will have the opportunity to apply the rubric to assess the sustainability of their own programs, and exchange ideas about the rubric and ways to promote sustainability within their own initiatives. The facilitators will provide space to exchange ideas for establishing more sustainable programs within a supportive environment.