YMI Cornerstone Mentoring Program
PSA evaluated the implementation and outcomes of the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development’s (DYCD) Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) Cornerstone Mentoring Program. Launched in New York City in 2011, YMI is a cross-agency initiative aimed at relieving the disparities in outcomes between young Black and Latino men and their peers in areas related to education, health, employment, and criminal justice. The DYCD YMI Cornerstone Mentoring Program targeted youth in fifth through ninth grade who are at risk of dropping out of school, and operated in community centers located in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) facilities and operated by nonprofit provider organizations.
Strengthening the Mentoring Experience—YMI Cornerstone Mentoring Program
Engagement in Learning—YMI Cornerstone Mentoring
Levers of Impact in YMI Cornerstone Mentoring
Higher Achievement
PSA served as evaluation partner to Higher Achievement, a rigorous program model in which students receive subject-area academic support from trained volunteer mentors, as the organization worked to deepen its impact on the students, schools, and communities it serves through a reconfigured program design it its four partner cities. In a transition from its traditional magnet center approach, Higher Achievement began to work more intensively with specific middle schools—offering support to students throughout the school at different levels of intensity. Through this whole-school approach, Higher Achievement aimed to create change at three levels: (1) in the middle school scholars who received intensive, direct services; (2) in partner schools that received additional support services, such as high school fairs and study halls; and (3) in the communities in which it operated, by changing school cultures and expectations. PSA worked with Higher Achievement to (1) articulate its theory of change for achieving whole school impact, including the specific conditions of partnership which are expected to contribute to the success of the model; (2) conduct interviews of school and Higher Achievement staff in the four partner cities; and (3) support improvement efforts in two schools through improvement cycles, grounded in the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Improvement Science methods. The findings from this evaluation informed Higher Achievement’s planned scale-up of the school-based approach, identifying the ways and conditions under which partnerships between schools and Higher Achievement could mature, anticipating challenges, and supporting continuous learning and improvement within the organization.
US 2020 (now the Makers + Mentors Network)
PSA conducted a formative evaluation of US2020’s efforts to increase the quality and quantity of STEM mentoring in partner cities across the United States and guide the development of a theory of change for the initiative. PSA provided feedback to US2020 about the conditions that supported or hindered implementation of the US2020 program approach and the ways in which US2020 staff, national partners, and local project directors used the data collected as part of the US2020 evaluation strategy to inform continuous improvement of the STEM mentoring program and communicate the results of the movement, locally and nationally.