Over the past few weeks, I had an opportunity to work with a wonderful non-profit in the metro Detroit area. My Sister Circle’s (MSC) mission is to create an environment that encourages healthy relationships between women of all ages.

One effort that helps this organization achieve this mission is the My Sister’s Keeper Mentoring Outreach Program (MSK-MOP). The outreach program is based at Denby High School on Detroit’s east side. This year, the 1-hour weekly after school session ran during the winter semester from April through June.

During this project we set our focus on the following design challenge.

How might we enhance the My Sister Circle Mentoring & Outreach Program curriculum to show young women their work, provide them with positive role models, and expose them to new opportunities?

Given this, I set out to help the organization accomplish three things:

• Standardize program curriculum
• Standardize program delivery methods
• Adjust the approach to fundraising

In order to do this I conducted over 10 interviews with founders, program coordinators, and curriculum developers from a variety of organizations that work with high school students. Through these interviews, I learned a lot of different best practices that could help MSC improve.

One of the challenging aspects of curriculum design for a mentoring and outreach program is that the desires outcomes often can’t be directly measured and the impact delivered usually isn’t realized immediately. To help link the program’s activities to the desired outcomes, I developed an evaluation framework that maps learning behaviors to intended goals. You can see one example below.

Once the framework is established, the program activities can be designed anew or modified to help student learn these behaviors more efficiently. The learning outcomes are measured by pre- and post- assessment in order to determine the extent to which the MSK-MOP has an impact.