Reinvigorating evidence for action and capacity in community HIV programs (REACH Project)
REACH was a collaborative research and practice initiative to develop evidence building frameworks, capacity, tools and resources with the Victorian HIV community partnership.
REACH consisted of three areas:
• The development of a broad policy logic framework – which aims to simultaneously look at the project, program and prevention system to understand the role of and relationship between the various programs and projects in HIV prevention.
• Participatory action research to develop and trial program logic models and evidence building approaches with staff from five projects across three community organisations
• Capacity building of sector staff through a series of capacity building workshops and mentoring activities. To monitor the impact of these initiatives, the REACH project conducted, among other strategies, a sector survey of in November 2011 and November 2012.
results: The sector survey indicated some small shifts in organisational culture towards supporting and conducting evaluation. Evaluation was valued more as was staff involvement in evaluation activities, incorporating evaluation into project planning and support for staff to develop evaluation skills. There was increased desire to share skills and learn from other staff across the sector. Although the project achieved some of its aims, there were aspects that were less successful in achieving sustained organisational change and much has been learned from these challenges.
Conclusion: Once the momentum for monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) and quality Improvement (QI) has been created at a project level, it needs to be followed by strategies that will embed the organisational practice changes. There should be a shift towards working at a program, agency and sector level. This includes establishing networks of practice to develop, implement and support MEL and QI guidelines for priority areas such as organisational evaluation leadership, sustainable evaluation approaches, and inter-agency evidence sharing to maximise the role of combined HIV prevention strategies.
