The MA Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Community Health and Prevention Division of Violence & Injury Prevention/Child Youth Violence Prevention (CYVPU) engaged ICH to conduct an evaluation of their HEAL program. HEAL is designed to prevent youth violence by increasing access to strengths-based protective factors, increasing young peoples’ psychological and physical safety and security, and reducing structural inequities that contribute to youth violence. ICH’s evaluation builds on existing measures incorporated into the HEAL program to assess HEAL’s processes and implementation successes across 50+ program grantees.
The evaluation team has worked with MDPH to develop evaluation questions, review existing grantee performance measures and reporting data, and collect program and organizational capacity data from current grantees. The overall evaluation aims to better understand program implementation and variation, program improvement, and program impact.