Measuring Our Project Outcomes

Hey everyone!


As we are nearing the start of our program, I believe this is a good time to discuss how we plan to evaluate the project.  We're not going to run this class and just sit around hoping that it helped our students in some way.  We will be doing our best to scientifically measure the outcomes of our program, so that the results can be used to improve all future efforts to help the incarcerated.

Our plans for measuring the success of our project are two-fold.  First of all, the program participants will be required to take part in the mock job fair held in the fall by Morgantown Federal Correctional Institution (FCI).  We will give the mock interviewers surveys to score each inmate on the strength of the inmate's employment documents and interview skills.  Once we gather all the results of these surveys, the scores of Resume Your Life participants will be compared to those of the remaining inmates.  Hopefully they will have done significantly better!

Furthermore, after each program participant is released from prison, we plan to contact their parole officers periodically to see how each program graduate is doing out in the real world, particularly concerning employment and crime involvement.  We hope to be able to check on each program graduate once every six months.  We will be comparing their life situations with those of the other inmates released from Morgantown FCI.  This is where things truly matter so hopefully we will have some great results!


I won't bore everyone by getting into more scientific detail than I have already.  If that is what you want, though, you can go to our website and check out the project outcomes paper that we have posted.  As always, I invite everyone to share their thoughts about all this in the comments below.


Just as a reminder, our program is indeed starting soon and we are still looking for any volunteers to help us set up, handle paperwork, and/or help with tutoring.  To volunteer or donate, contact us through our site or by phone at (304) 536-2271.


Exciting times coming up!