Project Background

The initiative of the ACE Resource Network to develop a place-based effort to raise awareness, prevent, and intervene on the associations among ACE and negative health and social outcomes, in Sacramento, CA will be a first of its kind effort. Such efforts are greatly strengthened by the inclusion of evaluation partners from the outset.  The Northeastern University Public Evaluation Lab (NU-PEL) brings together a team of inter-disciplinary faculty experts from the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research (IHESJR) in Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the Center for Crime, Race and Justice in The College of Social Sciences and Humanities, along with students of all levels from a wide range of programs to support community partnered, culturally responsive evaluation efforts that aim to promote health equity, social justice, equity in education, safety, and criminal justice.  

 The NU-PEL team is poised to partner with the ACE Resource Network to expand the evaluation capacity of their efforts in multiple ways. First, we will bring our expertise in culturally responsive evaluation (CRE) practices, which are rooted in Critical Race Theory and social justice. This comprehensive framework gives attention to historically and continuously marginalized groups and aims to consider of the needs and cultural parameters of those who are served relative to the implementation of the program and its outcomes. Second, we will utilize a multigenerational team approach and will apply an inter-disciplinary, holistic, mixed-method design to assess the impact of the Know Your Number campaign to three sub-populations in Sacramento, CA previously identified as gaining the greatest benefit from increased awareness of ACEs: Latinx young adults, LGBTQ+, and young adults living in extreme poverty.  Preliminary efforts may help to determine the acceptability of the current campaign to these groups and inform needed adaptations. Subsequent evaluation will examine the impact of the campaigns engaged with these groups. Lastly, as interventions are identified, developed or modified, and implemented, the NU-PEL team along with the experts from the IHESJR, IRJ, and other Northeastern and broader community of collaborators, including across our global campus network, will form research teams that include both evaluation and content expertise to inform and support the process and outcome evaluation efforts of such interventions.