Our business and project manager, Deborah, was married last Saturday at the McNamara Alumni Center in Minneapolis. She and her new husband, Andy, are on their honeymoon in Belize this week. We are very happy for them!
Several Improve Group staff were able to attend the wedding - and had a lot of fun :-)
It may seem odd, but one of the joys of our work is going to programs and actually learning about what they do and what they accomplish. In our work for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, we will be visiting all 87 counties in Minnesota plus a number of health plans and tribal governments to learn about how they administer the Home and Community Based Waiver program and assess elements of the quality framework (.pdf) developed by MDH.
This project is taking us around the state. A team of Improve Group staff (Sarah, Eric, Liz and Leah) spent time in International Falls and Grand Rapids this week. We had the chance to interview staff, conduct surveys and review participant records. We heard some funny stories -- and got to pick up some local culture like seeing the birthplace of Judy Garland (from the car).
One of the things we like about these site visits is they make the abstract concepts of policy real -- they show us how things operate in a real-world context. For example, several Counties have said that just having policy information available on the Internet is helpful; they don't have to try to schedule multiple staff to attend a training and instead can easily direct their staff to needed resources. Other staff have talked about the difficulty of balancing costs with individual needs; if money were no object, individuals could really benefit from 1:1 therapies, specialized equipment, and other services; however, it simply is not possible to provide the most expensive services to everyone. Staff take their job of finding the best services possible to have the greatest impact on those individual lives while staying within cost limitations. These stories are very powerful and help us understand how important high-quality information and evaluation work is; it can help people in making those difficult decisions.
Why is there a picture of Leah Goldstein Moses with Tom DeCaigny? This picture, from Lisbon, Portugal, was taken during the World Conference on Arts Education. Leah and Tom presented the Improve Group's evaluation results of the Performing Arts Workshop's Artists-in-Schools program. Amazingly, we heard that around the world arts educators face similar challenges: making the case for the arts to policy makers; forced competition for resources with other disciplines such as math and language arts; and a general fear/anxiety around the arts for educators. We also heard extremely exciting ways that arts educators are meeting these challenges, like developing radio dramas in Cameroon and building video literacy in Australia.
We left the conference very excited about finding new ways the performing arts can be used to improve academic outcomes, enhance critical thinking, and support pro-social behavior in the classroom. The Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education has made over 60 awards in its Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination program; resources developed through this program promoting arts education can be found here.
We moved to our new office at the beginning of June. It's pretty wonderful. We had a LOT of ups and downs planning for the move; purchasing cubes and furniture was much more complicated than expected! Now that we are settled in, though, the office really seems to help us work better. For one thing, there is the conference room--functional, comfortable, and large! We hope to offer it to groups that want to hold meetings in the future - it can seat up to 16 and is "wired".
Another nice treat is our.... copier! Who knew a printer/copier/scanner could make such a big difference? We've only had it for a month, so I haven't tracked our output yet, but it sure has made preparing handouts and reports a lot easier for us.
Feel free to come visit us - we are just south of the Mall and you can find directions here.
Welcome to the Inside Groove! We're excited to launch our weblog - expect entries several times a week. We'll use this as a forum to share company news, generate discussion about research, evaluation and strategic planning, and answer any questions you've been wanting to ask!
Around our office, we have a lot of news to share. We've moved to our new location in Bloomington . We've enjoyed the company of two interns over the summer - brought to us from Achieve! Minneapolis. We've launched two new evaluation projects, one with the Minnesota Department of Human Services and the other with Girl Scouts of the USA.