Research and Evaluation
We believe that research is critical to demonstrating the impact of our innovative programming, and helps us better understand how to develop programs and services to meet the community’s growing needs. Our research focuses on the influence of our prevention and intervention efforts, while exploring new opportunities to serve marginalized populations affected by family violence and abuse.
As a result of our innovative research, we have:
- Improved our in-house practices related to risk assessment and safety planning, contributing to increase’s in women’s safety
- Established the long-term value of our Healthy Relationships program for teens at risk of perpetrating violence, by showing the positive impact it had 2 years after the program
- Developed assessment tools, such as the Children’s Family Violence Exposure, to support our clinical work with children and their families
- Discovered that 62% of Calgarians have experienced family violence themselves, or know someone who has
- Demonstrated the response-based approach as a best practice in working with male perpetrators, reducing the perpetration of abusive behaviour
- Calculated the Social Return on Investment for our Children’s Outreach program
- Illustrated the value of group counselling for older abused women who have experienced a lifetime of abuse
We utilize a continuous quality improvement process to assess, monitor, evaluate, and improve our programs and services.
Comprehensive, continuous program evaluation provides us and our stakeholders with results, while guiding the development of promising practices and program delivery, and enhancing services to meet growing needs of our current and future clients. Demonstrated outcomes help to attract new potential funders, staff, volunteers, and clients to the agency, promote the agency’s programs to the public, justify budgets, and contribute to the long-term development of services.
Through our program evaluation, Calgary Women’s Emergency Shelter has:
- Secured project-specific and multi-year funding commitments from a range of funders and donors
- Added child care services for families accessing our programs and services
- Shared publications “Honouring Resistance” and “Choosing to Change” at no-cost to our clients and partners
- Participated in local, provincial and national efforts to capture the prevalence of family violence and abuse
- Expanded CWES programs and services to meeting expanding community need
- Shared best practices in data collection and assessment provincially and nationally
- Supported the development of the Court Support program for individuals and families needing assistance and guidance through the court systems
Click here if you would like to learn about our upcoming research.
