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How do we know if our program for youth is effective in meeting its outcomes?

Will our curriculum result in knowledge or behaviour change?

Is the approach we take in our health program based on sound research?

What are the critical needs in our community?

What strategies will result in higher rates of employee retention?

We Answer Your Questions

These are just a few examples of the questions that are addressed when we work with organizations in the area of evaluation. Every organization wants to make a positive difference through the work that they do with their clients, employees, or community members. Evaluation work answers these important questions and assists organizations in highlighting the strengths and challenges of their efforts.

Arbor Educational and Clinical Consulting Inc. is dedicated to providing high-quality services to our clients in our areas of practice. We work closely with organizations in order to support organizational, program/service development and delivery and evaluation. Through thoughtful planning, solid data, analysis, and reflection, we can assist your organization in moving forward in order to achieve desired goals and objectives.

Arbor Educational provides services in the areas of needs assessments, curriculum design, program design, program/practice evaluation, and educational workshops.

Janice Abbott

Executive Director / Atira Women’s Resource Society

Atira Women’s Resource Society recently contracted with Arbor Educational & Clinical Consulting Inc. to conduct an evaluation of a three-year, pan-Canadian research project, which involved representatives from all of Canada’s provinces and territories, save one, from urban, rural and remote communities and representing nonprofit organizations, First Nations and several levels of government. Arbor was respectful, collaborative and participatory and produced a robust evaluation that helped us understand where we excelled as a group of disparate but united organizations and individuals, and where we could improve for future projects. I believe Arbor’s work will also be useful to others embarking upon projects of this scope and magnitude. We are grateful to Arbor for the strength of their work and will definitely work with them again.

Helenka Jedrzejowski

Prevention Coordinator, Youth Addictions & Prevention Services / Vancouver Coastal Health

Denise has worked with us on a number of federally funded grant projects over the last 5 years. She has a knack for quickly understanding the evaluation parameters and designing something that meets both the needs of the funder and the implementing party. More importantly, when Denise develops an evaluation, she strives to go beyond the basics and strives to help us capture information that is meaningful and which can contribute to our iterative program development needs. Denise is great at working across teams and organizations to design evaluation tools and processes that are situationally sensitive and which respond to the needs our front line staff identify as being critical as far as client safety and excellent client experience are concerned. Denise has always helped meet our program evaluation needs ethically and efficiently. Plus, she’s such a warm personality! A pleasure to work with!

Rhiannon Wong

Child & Youth Services Coordinator / BC Society of Transition Houses

Our agency has worked with Denise at Arbor Educational and Clinical Consulting since 2007. For each project that we’ve worked on together, she has thoughtfully designed an external evaluation process that ensures unbiased and objective integrity. Denise goes the extra mile to answer all of my questions quickly and ensures that the voices of frontline anti-violence workers, women and children are heard.

June M. Maynard

Manager, Parent and Child Resource Programs / North Shore Community Resources Society

The Parent and Child Resource program at North Shore Community Resources Society has used Denise for several projects with excellent results. These projects have been diverse in scope, focus, and funding ranging from a major child care assessment of the community to project surveys and group facilitation. Denise always has a clear idea of the purpose and the best way to successfully achieve this within the inevitable budget restraints of non-profit programming.

Jill Atkey

Director, Research and Education / BC Non-Profit Housing Association

Denise recently conducted an evaluation of an online training program developed through collaboration with partner agencies. She engaged all of the partners in the development of the evaluation and checked in with us regularly about the status of the project. As a result of her collaborative and engaging approach, we ended up with a strong evaluation that provided a very clear sense of what worked well with the training and what we needed to improve upon. We would definitely work with Denise again.

Manager - large urban School District

It has been a very positive experience retaining Denise for over six years as the external evaluator of our project. The initiative she worked on for us is complex, multifaceted, involves many relationships and two large organizations. Denise consistently provided technically sound, creative, and realistic evaluation design, implementation, analysis, and reporting. Her reports were clear, well written, and attractively presented. Denise frequently exceeded what was expected and willingly provided valuable consultation on a range of issues, often on short notice. She also brings in-depth evaluation expertise as well as up-to-date research and practical knowledge regarding social and emotional learning and resilience in particular. Denise is a good listener, passionate about her work, and committed to high standards. Her sense of humour and pleasant manner makes it a pleasure to work with her. We plan to utilize Denise again in the near future. I highly recommend her to others.

Anne Mooi

Parks and Community Services / District of West Vancouver

I worked with Denise through initiatives and projects in North and West Vancouver. She helped guide staff in developing meaningful survey questions to get the information that we needed to move forward in our work. Denise knew the best ways in which to connect with varying audiences and demonstrated great communication and group facilitation skills. I was always impressed by her organization; adherence to timelines; flexibility; and reports that presented findings in a cohesive and respectful way.

Lynda Laushway

Executive Director / SWOVA Community Development and Research Society

Our experience working with Arbor Educational has been extremely positive. Denise is very skilled and is able to grasp the needs of the project and develop effective, appropriate evaluation tools. She is very pleasant to work with, helpful and efficient. Her evaluation reports are easy to read and visually appealing. SWOVA highly recommends Arbor Educational!

Sonia Lamont

Provincial Director / Prevention Programs, BC Cancer Agency

It is without hesitation that I recommend Arbor Educational. Over the course of several healthcare projects, Arbor Educational proved to be a highly professional organization that was flexible, communicative, attentive to timelines and deliverables all the while working within budget. The projects involved working with diverse groups, from the general public to specific populations as well as a range of ages and Arbor Educational was able to meet and exceed varying demands.

Debbie Magnusson

Eagle Ridge Coaching

Denise Buote developed an extensive evaluation for the first year of our Coaching project for Educational Leaders. The review was so complete, it provided our sponsors and clients gained insight into the depth of the experience; and helped us receive the financial support we needed to continue. We could not have asked for more. The sustained use of the evaluation constructed for our project is invaluable. The bonus of having it developed through a 100% collaborative process that matched our intentions was a highlight of the project. In addition, Denise continues to forward relevant links, resources, and news about similar projects. We were very lucky to have her work with us. Arbor Educational & Clinical Consulting offers a wealth of sound practice; both in consulting and in evaluation development. We were very fortunate that Denise’s background could meet the complexity of our needs. She worked collaboratively with us, so we really believed the evaluation would reflect our work and our clients’ experience. The presentation of findings was clear, readable, and foundational for future assessments. Denise Buote works to a very high standard.

Lisa Hubbard

Executive Director / Northshore Neighbourhood House

As executive director of a large nonprofit organization, I have relied on Arbor Educational to help our agency produce much-needed documents. These include applications, assessment needs reporting, and an extensive community survey. Denise is easy to work with, very creative, thorough, and professional. I strongly recommend working with Denise.

Sarah Hook-Nilsson

Coordinator / Connecting Generations School District 64

3 years ago Arbor Educational conducted the research and evaluation for the Connecting Generations "Bridging the Gap" project funded by Service Canada. The Connecting Generations program is now in its fourth year and has become not only a valuable part of School District 64 but also a well-respected part of our community. The groundwork laid by the thoughtful and thorough research and evaluation done by Denise Buote of Arbor Educational established the importance of our project in our school district and in the larger community. The impact of the Bridging the Gap forums was undoubtedly strengthened by the quality of Denise's work, one that continues today.

Julia Kaisla

Director, Community Engagement / CMHA BC Division

I worked with Arbor Educational a couple of times. First, she helped us evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of our online Understanding Addictions course. Denise was thoughtful and caring in her interactions with participants, and she contributed the findings to our larger advisory committee with a concise and visually effective report. She also took part in follow up discussions about the qualitative findings and answered questions about her methodology. It was because of this terrific experience that we approach Denise to support us in rolling out a survey to Canadian workplaces about their initiatives related to psychological health and safety in the workplace. Again, Denise met our expectations and exceeded those of our colleagues who were new to working with Arbor. With both projects, she has helped to move our organization forward in our understanding of client needs. Arbor helps us check whether we’re on the right path and offers recommendations on how to improve. Her work has made our organization stronger.

BC Society of Transition Houses

As an organization that develops and pilots new practices to improve the supports that women and their children experiencing violence will receive, we have externally evaluated most of our projects. Arbor Educational has been a great company to work with. They have been involved in the design of the evaluation from the onset of the project. They have been respectful of hearing the voices of women and workers and reflecting those voices in the evaluation.

Jeff Calbick

Director, Community Impact and Investment / United Way of the Lower Mainland

Denise Buote worked with United Way on a review of licensed school-aged child care in the Lower Mainland. This work involved ground-breaking research that identified service gaps, as well as assets in all communities in the region. It helped us develop new partnerships and influenced the design of a major granting area for United Way. Denise was great to work with and delivered quality work on-time. I appreciated that she took the time to understand United Way’s work in support of school-aged children, making the overall project and the research plan very relevant and responsive. She contacted over 400 private and non-profit school-aged child care providers in the development of the final report and participated as a keynote speaker at a related event to share her findings and to discuss trends and future directions. I would look forward to working with Denise again.