Collective Impact Models with Teresa McCaffrey
- On October 26, 2020
We had a chance to talk with Teresa McCaffrey of the Educational Partnership Center (EPC) at University of California, Santa Cruz this month. EPC oversees a collection of 10 programs aimed at preparing underrepresented students for college. Altogether, they serve 11,000 students in the Santa Cruz region. Though each program has a different goal, EPC has created a collective impact model that unifies the programs and makes explicit how they all contribute to the EPC’s overarching mission of improving college access and readiness in the region. Teresa is the Director of Research, Evaluation, and Innovation at EPC, which is a cool job because it means she gets to oversee the evaluation efforts of this collective impact model. In this episode, she shares with us some of the achievements and challenges she’s faced in this role.
As we’ve mentioned previously, Jen is an avid and enthusiastic consumer of the AEA 365 blog. This is where she discovered Teresa’s work on EPC’s collective impact model. Teresa’s blog post describes some of the features of the model as well as lessons learned. It also links to a few resources that have informed their thinking on collective impact, including this 2011 article by John Kania and Mark Kramer in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. We used the episode as a chance to dig a bit deeper with Teresa, both to expand our understanding of what the collective impact model is and how it works, as well as Teresa’s role as an evaluator. She talked a lot about the tools they are using to track and manage to outcomes, as well as their efforts to help program teams understand their data and use it to inform decisions. Teresa also talked about their experience using data placemats to facilitate the latter.
We really appreciated learning from Teresa and think you will, too!
CORRECTION: In our conversation with Teresa, she mentions that one of EPC’s programs, MESA, is not part of their Integrated Logic Model. After our conversation she confirmed that, in fact, it is.
Unwitting Sponsor! This month’s episode is brought to you by everyone’s favorite Spanish soup, gazpacho! For the first time ever, the sponsor was recommended by our guest. Teresa is a proud Spaniard and she reminded us of the refreshing summer treat that is gazpacho. Though summer has ended, we’ve heard that fall gazpacho is a thing and we beseech you to seek it out and let us know how it is!