Evaluation

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Donate to support the Project Evaluation at paypal.me/litupp

Help the Lioness Tale Prison Project reach a new level!

After offering our program at CCWF on an all-volunteer basis for more than 15 years, we hope to move beyond a team of volunteers to a team of professional employees who can achieve even bigger goals. With a paid leadership team, we know we can further increase our presence at CCWF and expand our program to other prisons and jails. We have a plan to achieve this goal, and the first step of that plan involves producing research-based evidence that will legitimize our program to major funding agencies and to other prisons.

We have begun to systematically collect data that will help provide evidence of the benefits we know our program achieves. We are working with Kelly Jarvis, the Director of Research in Community Health at NPC Research (www.npcresearch.com), and her collaborators Cate Samuelson and Ndidi Amutah to independently evaluate our program’s effectiveness. NPC is a firm in Portland, OR, that specializes in evaluating human service programs, including those within the criminal justice system. The evaluation team began planning the study in 2018 and is encouraged by the evidence gathered so far. That said, there is a lot of work to do before we can argue that Lit-uPP is an evidence-based program. Because Kelly and her team of researchers are only working on a volunteer basis, they are only able to work on this project on a start-and-stop basis between paid jobs. 

We will fast-track this process to demonstrate to potential funding agencies and prisons that we have a program that has remarkable outcomes. Therefore, we will raise $50,000 to implement a full evaluation study that will provide us with the necessary data. 

This comprehensive process and outcome study using rigorous research methodologies will include: 
  1. Conducting focus groups with inmates at CCWF about their experiences in the program
  2. interviewing prison staff (including the warden) about their perceptions of the program and its implementation; 
  3. Obtaining and analyzing extant prison administrative data (accessible by request to the state) that reflect key outcomes among inmates who participated in LiT-uPP and those who did not; 
  4. Analyzing the survey data that have been collected from our participants over more than a decade 
  5. Documenting, publishing, and presenting the results of this investigation;
  6. Providing insight into how the program might be improved and how other institutions implement it efficiently; and
  7. Refining these results to be the core of applications to potential funders

Please join our team by donating today. The women at CCWF and men and women at other facilities in the future need you. They need this chance to come to know themselves and in the process transform their future. 

We are grateful for your interest and support.