Anita Baker Project Director Anita M. Baker has worked as an evaluator for more than fifteen years. She specializes in conducting external evaluations of educational and non-profit programs and organizations, and in providing technical assistance for organizations conducting self-assessments or participatory evaluations. Anita earned her Doctorate in Education from Columbia University, Teacher's College in 1991 (Educational Administration with a focus on Evaluation), has maintained a successful independent evaluation consulting service, and formerly served as a project director and senior program officer of the Academy for Educational Development in New York City. Anita has designed, directed, and participated on evaluation teams focused on a wide range of subjects including youth development, arts education, community-based collaborations and integrated services, after school education, employment and training, foster care and transitional and supportive housing, and organizational evaluation capacity building. Recent projects include: Evaluation of Lifespan Senior Services' Future Care Planning Services project. Future Care serves caregivers, many elderly, who provide for developmentally disabled and other vulnerable adults who need to plan for future care. The evaluation focuses on caregiver and consumer satisfaction with the project, effectiveness of service delivery, and time resource management. Evaluation of the William Penn Foundation's Community Database System project. Anita served as part of an OMG team that helped the Foundation determine how effective their efforts had been in the support of technical grantees to develop database and data products for government and non-profit planning use. Evaluation of the New Jersey Child Assault Prevention Program (CAP). CAP is a nationally recognized community-based primary prevention program whose goal is to reduce the vulnerability of children to assault. The evaluation included a meta-analysis of other key studies about CAP as well primary data collection about CAP's prevention value from school administrators, parents, and CAP coordinators and facilitators. Evaluation of the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Initiative (APPI) and School-based Youth Services Program (SBYSP) Expansion for the New Jersey Department of Human Services. Both evaluations focused on implementation assessment of multi-site integrated service provision. Evaluation of the Partnership for After school Educations' (PASE) Summer Learning Initiative, Queens Cultural Partnership, and Sidewalk Arts programs. All three programs focused on arts-based educational enhancements for youth during out-of-school time, and all three evaluations focused on both service delivery and learning outcomes for youth. Anita provides training and coaching for non-profit and philanthropic staff seeking to build evaluation capacity and enhance evaluative thinking in their organizations. She has designed a comprehensive set of evaluation training materials and evaluative thinking assessment tools which, through the Bruner Foundation in Rochester and the Bowne Foundation in New York City, she has delivered to staff in more than fifty nonprofit organizations. Her methodological expertise includes work with evaluation data collected using both quantitative and qualitative methods, with special emphasis on the use of informational interviews and well-focused surveys including those delivered through web-based applications. < Return to Staff Listing