AMP’s Evaluation Journey

~ In The Beginning… ~


Have you ever been asked to name a role model or someone you look up to, and felt completely stuck in how to answer? If so, who did you eventually choose, and why? From my experience, I usually name someone in my life who has provided me support, advice, friendship, and guidance with kindness and sincerity. However, for many children and youth across Alberta, having someone readily available for consistent and trusted support is not always a reality. That is where mentoring programs, and the Alberta Mentoring Partnership (AMP), come into play.

From providing advice in stressful situations to sharing meaningful experiences, mentors play a vital role not only for the positive development of children and youth, but also in building stronger communities across Alberta. Recognizing this need and the importance of mentoring, AMP was formed in 2008 to be a resource with tools, training materials, and research aimed at enhancing the quality of mentoring. With over 240+ partners all across Alberta, AMP is working with agencies, government, and youth to actively reduce barriers to the provision and reception of meaningful mentoring and meet the needs of the unique populations they serve.

At this moment, I want you to stop and ask yourself, could you keep track of and effectively communicate with over 200 people? Keep in mind that what you are communicating needs to be specific to each person, with some overlap, of course. Sounds tough, right? Despite this being an extremely daunting task, AMP tackles this daily. Whether it is in communicating with schools offering mentoring programs or writing progress reports to funders, effective knowledge generation and mobilization has always been a core function and goal for AMP. Showing their dedication to continual learning and refinement of effective and meaningful communication, AMP has highlighted the importance of evaluation in strategic planning for many years.

Known as the process of learning about a program, initiative, or policy to improve, transform, or make a difference in the community or population being served, evaluation is AMP’s method of assessing how its resources, reporting, and its partners’ programming contribute to the wellbeing and development of youth in Alberta. Specifically, AMP has used evaluation to not only demonstrate its valuable role as a mentoring enabler, but also to determine how to best support their partnership in prioritizing the creation and mobilization of meaningful resources. Ultimately, evaluation is intended to keep AMP and its activities clearly aligned to their strategic goals to enhance mentoring across Alberta.

Learning how to communicate and being able to engage in program evaluations that lead to meaningful outcomes takes practice. AMP is no stranger to the many successes and barriers in learning about and conducting program evaluations. Luckily, in these next few blog posts, you can get the inside scoop on AMP’s journey with program evaluation over the years. So, stay tuned for next month’s edition in this new blog series, AMP’s Evaluation Journey!

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Rachel Zukiwsky, MEd
Doctoral Graduate Student
School and Clinical Child Psychology
University of Alberta

Meet the Author


Hi everyone! My name is Rachel Zukiwsky, and I am a doctoral student in the School and Clinical Child Psychology program at the University of Alberta. My academic and professional studies focus on understanding and supporting the healthy development of children, youth, and their families. I have been working as a graduate research assistant with the Evaluation Capacity Network (ECN) at the University of Alberta since 2022, and in partnership with AMP to build evaluation awareness and capacities within AMP and their partnering organizations. As a passionate evaluator and future child psychologist, I feel so lucky to be working with AMP to support mentoring services across Alberta.