Ford – BC recruitment and retention strategy evaluation

Back in 2018, as part of the childcare B.C. strategy as a whole, the B.C. government wanted to have a specific strategy or part of the strategy that was focused on recruitment and retention. And so as part of that, they put $136 million dollars towards eight tactics that were intended in different ways to increase recruitment and retention of the early care and learning workforce in B.C. And it kick-started a process that they were adding tactics and adding dollars to over the past five years, and they look likely to continue to do so.  

They secured the resources for hiring us as a nonprofit firm to guide, support, collect data, report out, under the guidance of this 25-member steering committee. 

At the very beginning it was about design of the evaluation, and we put together a framework which they approved, which took each of the key goals that the strategy was trying to achieve, broke it down into a number of key indicators that would show whether there was movement in the right direction. And we set about proposing and they endorsed different ways that we might collect data that would show that there was progress being made on each of those. 

Often evaluations are funded by the organization that is a government organization that is actually carrying out the program. But to be at that distance; we have government observers in them in the meetings, and they do ultimately make sure that we’ve fulfilled the agreement to produce reports and so on that that they’re the kind of the bottom line because they’re funding the exercise. But the direction and the decisions and the approvals for the deliverables all come from this sector steering committee, which has been a new way to work certainly for this length of time. We’re used to having a steering committee for a year or two. But with this kind of ongoing relationship, we get to learn a lot more and kind of bounce ideas and understand who we need to talk to about a particular question and so on. So it’s, it’s been a very productive partnership.