by Catherine Dizon

With the end of 2020 also came the close of another TCEC contract.  In just 3 short years, our talented TCEC team delivered 23 webinars, 15 newsletters, 22 papers, 34 presentations, 681 instances of technical assistance (TA), and another 1,989 additional instances of TA specifically for what ended up being the last round of data collection for Healthy Stores for a Healthy Community. 

Then we all lurched through 2020 and pivoted to finding ways to support remote and/or socially distanced evaluation as well as ways to keep people engaged especially as everything transitions to online.  Despite the unexpected challenges and changes, through collaboration, communication, and a little bit of creativity, we successfully survived negotiations for our new five-year scope of work, which started on January 1st.  We are excited to be to continue to provide you all with resources to efficiently conduct and use evaluation including some new additions to our new scope of work including videos, data collection instrument translations, and development of a new communication and dissemination plan.  As such, we want to hear from YOU, the competitive grantees, about how we can best provide evaluation capacity building support to you and your unique projects.  

If you need support from peers, there are two options to highlight:

The Tobacco Evaluator Alliance (TEA) recently established its vision, mission, and principles together with its steering committee, GrEEN TEA (short for the Group of Executive Evaluators Network, because we love our acronyms!)  TEA also chose a winning logo from a logo contest that highlights the communication, innovation, and best practices that TEA aims to promote.  TEA members created a resource on COVID Flex Options to help projects think through some adjustments that may need to be made when unexpected things happen.  We invite you to have all members of your evaluation team join TEA to get connected with others working on evaluation in tobacco control programs.

Another exciting opportunity for peer support and community is the Competitive Project Alliance. 

Their mission is, “To empower California Tobacco Control Program Competitive Project Leaders to share resources, encourage collaboration and provide mutual support.”  Make sure you respond to their survey: https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/6179096/Competitive-Projects-Alliance to get linked into this new community.

We also have a few other new developments coming up including a new evaluation guide and accompanying webinar.  Please register for the April 15th webinar to learn all about it.  TCEC has been working with CTCP and local program evaluators to revise the Evaluation Guide.  For some context, the last time the guide was released in 2007, it came with a CD-ROM!  It will be available electronically so that you can search and jump to the information you need.  It seems like ages ago when we conducted listening sessions with groups of competitive grantees, local agencies, statewide projects, and evaluators from all over California.  Thank you to the many people that contributed to or helped review and improve the guide. We couldn't have done it without you! 

And last but certainly not least, our Statewide Coordinating Centers are promoting the sharing and use of data for priority populations.  TCEC is partnering with them to collect voluntarily submitted data collection instruments and protocols as well as data or data products to be made available to you all in a searchable database.  We'll also work together to provide overall guidance for collecting demographic data, so stay tuned for more info!  In the meantime, you can search data from statewide surveillance systems, survey questions used in statewide surveillance systems or data collection instruments previously used by local projects that can be adapted for your community. 

As always, TCEC is here to help! Contact us anytime through our Help Desk at tcecTA@phmail.ucdavis.edu.  We look forward to serving as your evaluation TA provider for the next five years.