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Evaluation Activities
Becoming healthier means changing behaviour and making better choices. Yet changes can be hard to make. We want to know what projects work and why. That can help inform future work in health promotion in Aboriginal communities for Aboriginal peoples. 
Our Aboriginal ActNow BC activities are guided by a comprehensive evaluation framework that revolves around two key questions: 1) How do individuals influence positive changes in their communities? and 2) How do communities influence positive changes in individual community members?
In March 2007, the NCCAH collaborated with the National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy on a workshop to explore indigenous perspectives on evaluation. A formal report of the proceedings of the workshop, entitled Exploring Evaluation in Aboriginal Health was created in March 2007.
In order to build evaluation capacity in our partner organizations and in Aboriginal communities, Aboriginal ActNow hosted an intensive two-day evaluation train-the-trainer workshop in June 2008. Facilitated by expert evaluator Kim Scott from Kishk Anaquot Health Research, the workshop provided evaluation champions from each partner organization with practical hands-on evaluation training and resources, including an evaluation guidebook entitled Evaluating ActNow Programs: A Guide for Indigenous Communities in BC.
Since the June training event, all of our partners have completed an evaluation framework for their projects including logic models and evaluation questions to guide the collection of data. The evaluations are focused on process (how and why we did what we did) but will also provide valuable insight into how activities influenced health outcomes.
A major focus in the next year will be our support for the 2009/2010 evaluation of the Honour Your Health Challenge - a remarkably successful community health support program that has trained some 2,500 community champions since its inception - to identify best practices in community-based health promotion projects. As well, a comprehensive process evaluation of Aboriginal ActNow's program design and implementation is currently underway and will be completed by 2010.
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