The Research Triangle Park Evaluators’ (RTPE) next meeting will be held on Friday, November 18, 2016 at The Frontier (800 Park Offices Drive, Durham, NC 27703, http://www.rtp.org/about-us/the-frontier/about-us/) beginning at 11 am.

We will be a large group this month, as we will have 20 students joining us from Greg Cizek’s Program Evaluation class at UNC. We will meet in the classroom this month to make sure that we have room for all attendees.

Meeting Agenda:
11:00am – 11:10am Announcements and Introduction
11:10am – 12:00pm Presentation (with 15-minutes reserved for a Q&A)
12:00pm – 1:00pm Optional networking lunch (Dr. Graham will join us until 12:30 PM; light refreshments provided; we invite you to participants to bring their lunch or purchase from the Food Truck Rodeo)

About the presentation: Dr. Philip Graham will join us to share success and challenges that come with engaging community stakeholders in large-scale, rigorous program evaluations. He will use examples from a national cross-site evaluation for the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention’s Partnerships for Success (PFS) program funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSA). PFS addresses underage drinking, prescription drug misuse, and other substance abuse prevention across 600 communities in 47 states, eight territories/jurisdictions, 13 tribal organizations, and the District of Columbia. Dr. Graham will highlight how Qualitative Cross-site Analysis (QCA) is applied to identify promising patterns in service delivery and how he uses a variety of dissemination strategies through the evaluation cycle to promote stakeholder engagement and evaluation use.

About the Presenter: Phillip W. Graham is Director of RTI’s Drugs, Violence, and Delinquency Prevention Research Program within the Center for Justice, Safety, and Resilience. He has more than 20 years of experience conducting community-based research and evaluation, with researching focusing on evaluating preventive interventions developed to reduce and prevent adolescent interpersonal violence and substance use. Dr. Graham currently serves as the project director on several national cross-site evaluations assessing community efforts to reduce underage drinking, prescription drug misuse and abuse, marijuana use, and opioid deaths. His methodological focus includes the use of mixed-methods approaches, and his research emphasizes the importance of culture, community context, systems change, and place-based strategies.