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Evaluation Services
Evaluation That Strengthens Programs and Tells Your Story
CCRP works with organizations to assess the effectiveness, equity, and long-term impact of their initiatives. Our evaluations help partners understand what's working, what could improve, and how programs create change in rural communities.
Effective evaluation in rural settings means capturing the nuanced, sometimes hard-to-quantify ways programs create lasting change — not just measuring outputs. We work alongside program staff and collaborators to design evaluations that fit your goals and context, whether process evaluations, outcome assessments, or developmental evaluations for emerging initiatives. The result is more than a funder requirement — it's a tool for learning, strengthening programs, and telling the story of your impact.
Evaluation Services: Our Approach
Our evaluations are grounded in community and partner engagement, and designed to reflect the rural and Tribal contexts in which programs operate. We focus on producing insights that are practical and actionable, while keeping equity at the center — examining who benefits and where gaps remain.
Our Evaluation Activities May Include:
- Logic model development
- Survey design and administration
- Structured interviews & focus groups
- Data analysis and visualization
- Accessible, community-ready reports
Featured Evaluation Projects
The projects below offer a glimpse into the range and depth of CCRP's evaluation work — from health career pathways to program evaluations for county and nonprofit partners and child welfare compliance monitoring.
Health Career Pathways
Conducted by the California Center for Rural Policy, the Health Career Pathways evaluation work examined a community-driven effort to address healthcare workforce shortages in Del Norte and Tribal Lands (DNATL) through a grow-your-own approach. After years of unsustainable recruitment and retention cycles, the initiative shifted focus to cultivating local youth interest in healthcare careers — building a pathway to ensure professionals are more likely to remain and serve the communities they grew up in. The evaluation documented tangible early wins, including the establishment of a health career pathway at Del Norte High School and the return of a long-absent LVN-to-RN bridge program at College of the Redwoods. The findings offer a replicable model for rural and Tribal communities facing similar workforce challenges.
Humboldt County Child Welfare Services Compliance Monitoring
As the court-designated independent compliance monitor for the Stipulated Supplemental Judgment in People of the State of California v. Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services, the California Center for Rural Policy monitors and publicly reports on Humboldt County Child Welfare Services' progress in implementing mandated reforms. Published bi-annually, these independent assessments track CWS's efforts to improve service delivery and strengthen collaboration with local Tribes and partner organizations — ensuring corrective measures translate into meaningful change for vulnerable children and families.
Klamath Promise Neighborhood 2025 Report
As the designated evaluator for the Klamath River Promise Neighborhood (KPN), a federally funded cradle-to-career initiative serving Tribal and rural communities in Northern California, the California Center for Rural Policy assesses and publicly reports on KPN's progress toward improving educational and life outcomes for children and families. These annual evaluations integrate quantitative and qualitative data to track performance across federally required GPRA indicators — spanning early childhood readiness, K–12 achievement, graduation, postsecondary access, and community well-being — ensuring that place-based investments translate into measurable progress for the region's most underserved communities.
More Ways We Support Rural Communities
When to Partner With Us
Organizations come to CCRP when they need more than a report — they need evaluation that reflects program realities and can hold up in funding conversations, board presentations, and continuous improvement processes.
We're a strong fit when you want to:
- Assess whether your program is achieving its intended outcomes
- Understand who is benefiting and where gaps in equity remain
- Strengthen funder relationships with credible, independent evaluation
- Build internal learning culture and capacity for ongoing improvement
- Document program impact in rural and Tribal community contexts
