CCHE Celebrates 30 Years of Evaluation

This is a landmark year for us—the 30th year since we began evaluating community-based health initiatives.

It’s been a wonderful journey partnering with an incredible diversity of communities, organizations, funders, and others to further our collective mission of improving community health.

We began in 1990 with a contract awarded to the Group Health Center for Health Promotion to evaluate a national health promotion initiative. Through this and subsequent evaluations, the evaluation team, which would later form CCHE, began learning about what works to conduct a meaningful evaluation of community health improvement strategies. Along the way we have shared what we are learning with the field about the importance of engaging stakeholders in all phases of an evaluation, focusing on realistic outcomes that matter and can be expected to change during the course of the initiative, using data collection methods that balance rigor and burden on participants, and regularly sharing back information and insights with all partners. This continuous learning informs how we approach evaluation. As we reflect on our 30 years of work, we want to thank each of you for your partnership in improving the health of our communities.

Over the past 30 years, we have:

• Worked in hundreds of communities in 48 states, traveling by plane, train, car, and dog sled to visit the communities with whom we were working 
• Conducted over 300 evaluations—check out our interactive timeline to learn more about our evaluations
• Grown from an informal interest group of researchers and health promotion staff across Group Health Cooperative into a dedicated team of 17 that comprise CCHE, a department within Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. 

In 2020, we will be sending out a monthly email to share our learnings with you about a variety of topics. These CCHE Notes will bring together our lessons learned over the last 30 years with our work on current evaluations. We look forward to sharing and engaging with you on these topics and continuing to learn with you the best ways to improve community health.

Please contact us for more information: Maggie.E.Jones@kp.org