Are you a skilled evaluator with a commitment to social justice and anti-racist data and measurement? Do you enjoy working collaboratively with partners to practice data-informed decision making? Are you interested in putting your skills to work to make a difference in your community? If so, we may be looking for you!
We are excited to bring on four new team members:
- Two evaluators to support Best Starts’ Sustain the Gain (ages 5-24) work. Programs these evaluators would support include those that empower youth; support social-emotional development, mental wellbeing, positive identity, health, academics and employability; and provide safe and healthy spaces for youth to connect with peers and supportive adults in and out of school.
- One evaluator to support the Community Information and Early Childhood Supports work. This evaluator will support programs that promote community information and advocacy, systems navigation, training and technical assistance, and behavioral supports for families and individuals with developmental disabilities or delays. In addition, they will also support several BSK Investing Early (prenatal to age 5) funded programs that advance the Early Childhood Supports Team’s mission of nurturing the development and wellbeing of all children prenatal to five and their families through culturally relevant, equitable, and meaningful supports and services, countywide.
- One mid-level evaluator to support the BSK Child Care Subsidy and Workforce Demonstration Project. Best Starts support the critical infrastructure of child care with subsidies to expand access to care and a salary supplement to low-paid child care providers. This brand-new body of work will offer many opportunities for learning and measurement that will inform child care systems across the state. The evaluator will support performance measurement as well as internal and partnership evaluation activities that will guide ongoing implementation and inform the field of child care.
These positions are centrally located within the Performance Measurement and Evaluation (PME) unit of the DCHS Director’s Office. PME is composed of a team nearly 40 dedicated program evaluators and data analysts who work with program staff and providers to develop frameworks for understanding the outcomes and equity impacts of DCHS programs. This work includes determining appropriate performance measures, managing data collection, supporting continuous quality improvement, and conducting in-depth analyses to inform decision making and improve service delivery. PME disseminates research and evaluation findings and promotes organizational learning through published reports and online dashboards.
These evaluator positions will work with program staff and service providers to use data to measure, continuously improve, and report about programming. This includes developing data collection plans, creating routine and custom reports, facilitating data-focused conversations, etc. These positions may also support the development of requests for proposals (RFPs) and conduct outcomes-focused program evaluations that assess a program’s contribution toward division- and BSK-wide goals.
Job Duties
- Facilitate equity-informed processes to co-design performance measurement plans with community and government partners.
- Develop data collection methods and support partners to collect, analyze, and interpret data for continuous quality improvement.
- Analyze and interpret both quantitative and qualitative data using appropriate statistical methods and data manipulation tools.
- Conduct analyses to explore inequities in program access, quality, and outcomes.
- Design, manage, and conduct in-depth evaluation in collaboration with providers, program managers, and/or external evaluators.
- Develop reports, dashboards, presentations, and other visual representations of data to support the use of data in decision making and continuous quality improvement activities.
- Perform other related duties as assigned.
Experience, Qualifications, Knowledge, Skills
- Deep knowledge of equity and social justice principles and practices and ability to apply this knowledge to all areas of the work, including methods, analysis, results interpretation, and dissemination.
- Demonstrated experience working with social, health or human services projects in designing and implementing real world performance measurement, including quantitative and/or qualitative approaches.
- Strong oral and written communication skills, including experience conveying evaluation concepts to stakeholders with a varying degree of evaluation or data expertise and making formal presentations to diverse audiences.
- Demonstrated ability to facilitate conversations among individuals with diverse perspectives to develop shared understanding and/or common goals or measures.
- Ability to clean, validate, and analyze data using at least one statistical software or programming application, such as R, Excel, SQL, etc.
- Experience with or interest in learning data visualization tools, such as Tableau.
Desired Qualifications:
- Background or experience in developmental disabilities, early childhood, child care, and/or youth and family services and programming.
- Ability to manage and link data from multiple internal and external sources.
- Skilled in using at least one statistical software or programming application (R, STATA, SAS, Python, SQL, Tableau, ArcGIS, etc.).
- Experience in utilizing a Results-Based Accountability framework.
Best Starts for Kids
Building on the deep knowledge, connections, and skills within King County communities, and backed by what science and research tells us about human development, the Best Starts for Kids King County initiative meets children and families with the right services at the right time. The first Best Starts for Kids levy, approved by King County voters in 2015, reached 490,000 of King County’s youngest children and their families and 40,000 youth and young adults, catalyzing strong starts in a child’s earliest years, and sustaining those gains through to adulthood. In August 2021, King County voters chose to renew the levy with over 62% approval for another six years. The plan for Best Starts for Kids 2.0 will maintain current Best Starts for Kids investments in promotion, prevention, and early intervention, while deepening our investments to address critical needs in our community. View the Best Starts for Kids Implementation Plan: 2022 – 2027 here.