Dr. Stephen Sills (Center for Housing and Community Studies) received new funding from the Greensboro Downtown Greenway for the project “Evaluation Planning for the Greensboro Downtown Greenway.” Dr. Jennifer Toller Erausquin, Dr. Kenneth Gruber, Dr. Robert Strack, and Dr. GracieLee Weaver are co-principal investigators on the project.
The Downtown Greenway is a multi-use, walking and biking trail that promotes “fitness, connectedness, and well-being in the community.” The Greenway is a collaborative project of the City of Greensboro and Action Greensboro. Within a one-mile radius of the Greenway are 28,450 residents with a diverse socio-economic profile. Funded by a grant from The Safe States Alliance, Action Greensboro will engage UNCG in evaluation planning.
The project will be structured using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Evaluation Framework and conducted using the principles of collaborative evaluation. Using purposeful and snowball sampling, the evaluation team will engage stakeholders in discussions to elicit and align values and promote buy-in and collaboration.
The team will explore the history and significant activities of the Downtown Greenway; identify the shared vision that encouraged its development; identify inputs, activities, and outputs; identify desired outcomes and impacts as well as potential moderators; and discover established monitoring and evaluation activities and their associated costs. UNCG Principal Investigators will also provide technical support and advising to Action Greensboro. The final plan will establish processes for evaluation, develop a logic model to drive the process, and identify strategies to sustain and integrate future evaluation activities.
