Your Partners for Transformative Change
Evaluation
C4 Innovations offers a flexible, practical, trauma-informed, and equitable approach to evaluating services, programs, and systems at the local, state, and federal levels. Our team brings expertise in quantitative and qualitative methodologies, community-engaged and participatory research, and trauma-informed, person-centered approaches.
Lasting organizational and community change is guided by many different sources of information and data. Evaluation is strongest when it is dynamic, iterative, and rooted in strong partnerships and collaboration.
Transform Your Services
Every C4 partnership is fully customized. Reach out to learn more about C4’s evaluation services!
Our Team Specializes In:
- Trauma-informed, person-centered, and restorative evaluation and research practices
- Engagement of people with lived and living experience as partners on evaluation design and implementation
- Mixed-methods design, survey design and administration, focus groups and listening sessions, key informant interviews, and qualitative and quantitative analysis
- Continuous quality improvement principles and learning
- Development of culturally responsive and sustainable approaches that are feasible, relevant, and impactful in communities
- Dissemination of findings to all partners, including communities and service recipients
We Can Help You With:
- Evaluating public and private sector behavioral health programs, practices, and policies for children, youth, and adults, including those funded by federal, state, and municipal entities
- Substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery
- Mental health, including shared decision making and person-centered planning
- Peer-delivered interventions, including near age peer services with adolescents
- Convening national youth advisory boards for evaluation oversight
- Evaluating organizational or system initiatives, policies, or processes
- Conducting program, process, formative, summative, or participatory evaluation
- Conducting comprehensive environmental scans and needs assessments, emphasizing local contexts and national best practices
- Supporting agencies and communities to make data-driven decisions for culturally responsive and sustainable program improvement and structural change across the housing, behavioral health, and recovery spectrum
- Structural analyses of assessment tools and processes
- Developing trauma-informed assessment rubrics and evaluation frameworks
- Conducting organizational assessments around psychological safety and trauma-informed practices
- Creating peer review processes for curriculum materials
- Assessing organizational culture and workforce retention issues
- Supporting organizations to more effectively serve families and individuals who are marginalized by housing instability and homelessness with person-centered, trauma-informed evaluation across the housing, housing unstable, and homeless sectors:
- Mixed-methods data collection and analysis to include qualitative interviews, focus groups, and listening sessions as well as and HMIS and other quantitative system data to ensure a 360 review and accurate recommendations
Our Experts
Examples of Our Work
Implementing Process Evaluation for Recovery Education Initiative
The mission of the Recovery Education Collaborative (REC) is to promote lifelong learning enhanced by sustainable recovery for individuals with lived experience in addiction and recovery throughout Massachusetts through culturally responsive educational training programs. REC strives to create a community that values and uplifts all its members and is dedicated to working in partnership with individuals and families to promote recovery, healing, and wellness. REC also supports further development, enhancement, expansion, delivery, and promotion of recovery support training and technical assistance for individuals in the substance use peer support workforce and organizations. C4 implements and monitors evaluation activities upholding the mission, vision and values of REC through a culturally sensitive, inclusive, and equitable lens. The REC evaluation is a multi-year, mixed methods process evaluation designed to understand impact across Massachusetts, promote equity, and facilitate data-driven program design and activities. The evaluation design and what is reported annually is flexible and responsive to project needs, the current local recovery environment, and initial findings, barriers, and successes of evaluation implementation.
Scanning Ohio Behavioral Health and Housing
For the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, C4 conducted an innovative environmental scan of behavioral health housing models (supportive housing, recovery housing, and residential adult care facilities). The C4 team used a mixed-methods and multiphase approach to collect information and data for the scan. The team conducted a comprehensive document review process of local reports, scans, policies, and existing laws pertaining to behavioral health and housing, and regulatory documents. We also executed a literature review and a review of national models. Our team conducted 30 interviews, seven focus groups, two listening sessions, two “town hall” meetings, and a brief quantitative survey. The scan documented the statewide landscape, recommended opportunities to improve access to different housing models, and envisioned an integrated, equitable, accessible continuum of housing and support options. Interim findings and recommendations were vetted by our partner agencies and people with lived expertise. Read an overview of our findings and the full report.
Evaluating Housing and Homeless Programs
Over the last several years, C4 has evaluated numerous homeless Continuums of Care (CoC) Coordinated Entry Systems (CES), several Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) state implementations and individual teams, and emergency housing and shelter projects in communities around the country. We begin by interviewing people with lived experience to understand their perspectives. Our approach includes establishing best practices, examining redundancies, and identifying project needs, gaps, and performance goals. We take a mixed methods approach using both qualitative and quantitative data. Our evaluations have also included overall performance, reporting requirements, and Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) measures.