2022 CES Conference / Congrès 2022 de la SCÉ

In the final year of the Bachelor of Child Studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary, students take a Capstone course in which they work together with community partners on innovative and impactful projects. Our Capstone of 11 students partnered with the Evaluation Capacity Network to help build evaluation capacity in the early childhood field across Alberta. We have navigated the diversity of two distinct disciplines, a range of backgrounds and professional experiences, a multitude of supervisors and diverse community partners and a variety of evaluation approaches and frameworks. This presentation will focus on the challenges, successes, learnings and growth that we experienced as we worked through four evaluations and made connections back to the overall network. Despite the diversity and complexity of initiative, we learned that having a strong core team is what made the Capstone successful. Student, faculty and community partner experiences will be part of the presentation.