Program Evaluations for Youth Development Services
San Antonio's mission is to empower youth and young adults to achieve their full potential by providing quality educational programming in a safe environment.
Project at a Glance:
Role:
Data Scientist
Hours Engaged:
566
Skills & Stack:
Python, SQL, Google Sheets, pgAdmin,
Problem
SA Youth provides educational training, career development, and mental health care services to youth and young adults in San Antonio. They collected a large amount of data on their services in their Salesforce database, but the data was not organized in an effective way to use for fundraising or assessing program impact. Their team did not have the capacity to analyze this data and needed support with data cleaning, modeling, and evaluation to understand the impact of their life-changing programs.
Solution
Through a Prometheus Capstone Program, Data Science fellows from The Knowledge House conducted statistical analyses to provide thorough program evaluations for SA Youth. Across all teams, fellows conducted a data quality health check to help SA Youth improve their data collection process. Fellows also modeled the data to build consistent, analysis-ready metrics, allowing the organization to revisit the analysis in the future. The fellows were split into three teams to accomplish this, each focusing on a core evaluation area. These evaluations help SA Youth not only assess their impact, but also demonstrate it to funders, keeping their programs free for students to earn a diploma, access mental health services, and more.
“Working on a Prometheus project was a meaningful and growth-oriented experience. It allowed me to apply my technical and analytical skills in service of a nonprofit’s real-world mission, while also building confidence in client communication and project management. The process gave me insight into the messiness of real data, the importance of stakeholder alignment, and the power of translating complex analytics into compelling narratives. I would recommend this experience to any data or project professional looking to make a real-world impact.” - Jessenia (Data Science Fellow, The Knowledge House)