McClanahan Associates

McClanahan Associates, Inc. (MAI) practices a strong collaborative and team-oriented approach. We value close cooperation with organizations in order to create realistic, meaningful and credible evaluation designs, without overburdening on-site staff with time-consuming, extraneous data collection activities. As a team, we believe that suitable evaluation activities are only those intended to strengthen a program, and we therefore implement program-specific, developmentally-appropriate evaluation activities. In evaluating initiatives in the early implementation stage, we focus on building data collection systems and teaching the program staff to collect and use data to improve programs. Our evaluations of mature programs involve a customized impact study to investigate if and, more importantly, how the program changes the lives of its participants. We also specialize in formative evaluations of programs at various stages of development. Some of our current projects are: National Cares Mentoring Movement MAI is conducting an evaluation of the National Cares Mentoring Movement's The Rising initiative: aconsciousness-changing, group-mentoring initiative equal to the crisis our under-resourced children are facing. With locations in South Florida, Chicago and Detroit, The Rising aims to scale its racial healing programming for youth nationally.