Whew! It has been a whirlwind of travel for me this month at the Improve Group! The first week of November I had the fabulous opportunity to attend and present at Evaluation 2006, 20th Annual Conference of the American Evaluation Association in Portland, Oregon. It was three days packed with sessions presented by evaluation gurus, mavens and colleagues on their experiences, perceptions and philosophical musings about the future of evaluation at home and abroad. I was surprised by the amount and enlightened by the descriptions of international participatory evaluation studies in Brazil, Spain, India and Kenya presented at the conference. Other highlights were listening to Michael Quinn Patton talk about his newly coined method “Developmental Evaluation” to evaluate programs that in this day and age of fast change, are in a constant state of flux; and Ernest House expound on the ever-increasing bias in drug testing as drug companies perform their own research and use this scenario as an analogy for the future of evaluation if we as evaluators lose our moral and ethical codes of conduct and succumb to client bias. With all these ideas swirling in my head, I was also able to discuss these issues at length with fellow researchers and evaluators from the Twin Cities, as we all gathered for a dinner of Thai food in downtown Portland. My own presentation was on overcoming the challenges of cross-site evaluations, using our evaluation of Girl Scouting in Detention Centers in 2005 as a model of success.

The week following the trip to Portland, I headed south to Missouri for a PAVE site visit. Nice to have a bit of warmer weather for a day or so! Leah and I had the opportunity to observe anti-violence programs for middle school girls and talk at length with the dedicated staff that put the programs together. But that’s not the end of my November travels, for the week after that I flew to Washington state and then to South Dakota for more PAVE site visits! An emergency landing in Spokane, WA was the only delay through all that flying about. In addition to meeting and talking with more wonderfully dedicated people during these visits, and I got to see the Washington Sound (close enough to the Pacific Ocean for me!) and after Brooke joined me in South Dakota, take a slight detour to view those awesome South Dakota Band Lands.

It was very nice to see the Minneapolis skyline during our descent on that last trip from South Dakota! I arrived home but not for long as my family and I then drove to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. It was a relaxing and filling long weekend of good food and family! Happy Thanksgiving everyone!