NYC Opportunity Launches EmPWR and Men Teach Evaluations
Source: Urban X Studio, Oficina Design | Photographer: Gina LeVay
The Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity) has recently launched evaluations of two City programs, Environments Promoting Wellness and Resilience, an initiative to improve the work of domestic violence shelters through better design, and NYC Men Teach, an initiative to increase the representation of men of color among New York City public school teachers. NYC Opportunity conducts evaluations of programs like these to measure their effectiveness and to determine whether they are worth continuing and possibly expanding.
These two evaluations are the first that are being conducted by evaluation partners from a new cohort of 11 evaluation firms that were selected last year through a competitive process. As such, they are the start of a new era in NYC Opportunity’s evaluation work.
The two programs that are being evaluated:
Environments Promoting Wellness and Resilience (EmPWR)
Starting in 2019, nine New York City domestic violence shelters began participating in Environments Promoting Wellness and Resilience (EmPWR), an NYC Opportunity-funded initiative to improve the mental health of staff and residents through built environment redesign. EmPWR partners with a team of architects to engage domestic violence shelter residents and staff in a participatory design planning process, using design changes to a shelter’s communal space to support the social-emotional needs of survivors and their children. Selected as part of NYC Opportunity’s Call for Collaborative Innovations in 2019, EmPWR has collaborated with nine domestic violence shelters over four years, and the project will conclude on June 30th, 2023.
NYC Opportunity and EmPWR’s agency partners, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the NYC Human Resources Administration (HRA), have launched the EmPWR evaluation with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago. NORC will be conducting an implementation and outcomes evaluation to identify and assess factors enabling and impeding implementation, and any outcomes built environment enhancements had on shelter staff and residents. The evaluation also seeks to understand opportunities to scale to different sites or settings. The evaluation approach uses community-centered principles to engage a Community Advisory Board comprised of shelter leadership, staff, and residents to inform research design, analysis, and dissemination. NORC will be partnering with the New York Academy of Medicine and Evaluation + Learning Consulting, an M/WBE firm for this evaluation. The evaluation report and a guide to the EmPWR project’s implementation and participatory process, which may be helpful for organizations interested in implementing a similar project, are expected to be released in 2024.
NYC Men Teach (NYCMT)
NYC Men Teach (NYCMT), which launched in 2016, is a collaboration between the City’s Young Men’s Initiative (YMI), NYC Public Schools (NYCPS), CUNY, and a wide variety of community partners to inspire men of color to become teachers in New York City public schools. NYCMT consists of distinct CUNY and NYCPS components: the CUNY component engages and provides wrap‐around supports to students interested in teaching, and the NYCPS component recruits and supports full‐time teachers and classroom paraprofessionals. NYCMT’s work is guided by the principle that developing a teaching workforce that better reflects the diversity of New York City public schools can make a difference in the lives of young people who are not accustomed to seeing men of color represented in the classroom. NYC Opportunity is partnering with YMI on performance management and evaluation of NYCMT.
NYCMT City partners launched an evaluation of NYCMT with Westat in June 2023. Westat will conduct an evaluation to develop an in-depth understanding of the elements of the program that have the greatest impact on participants as well as the program’s broader effectiveness in increasing the recruitment and retention of male teachers of color. Westat will use qualitative methods, including interviews and focus groups, to explore various stakeholders’ experiences with NYCMT, along with quantitative methods to assess additional program impacts. Westat is also planning to form an evaluation advisory board consisting of program participants to engage throughout evaluation design, data collection, and data analysis, and to discuss preliminary findings. This new evaluation builds on an early implementation evaluation conducted in 2019. The final evaluation report is expected to be released in 2024.
