Peter J. York

Education: BA: Purdue University, MSSA & PhD (ABD): Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences in Social Service Administration
Service Expertise: evaluation
TCC Practice Areas: Philanthropy and Nonprofit

Publications:

• A Funder's Guide to Evaluation: Leveraging Evaluation to Improve Nonprofit Effectiveness
• "Learning As We Go"
• "Pulling Together"
• "Building the Capacity of Capacity Builders"
• "Evaluating Capacity-building Efforts for Nonprofit Organizations."
• New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives, Vol. 2: Theory, Measurement and Analysis. Aspen Institute

Presentations & Speeches:

• Presenter, "Peer Evaluation: Building Grantees' Internal Capacity for Program Evaluation," Council on Foundations
• Co-presenter, "Capacity Building for Organizational Effectiveness" at the Alliance for Nonprofit Management
• Presenter, "Evaluative Learning: Making Evaluation Work for Everyone," New York Regional Association of Grantmakers
• Co-conducted workshops for the Association of Small Foundations
• Led a workshop on evaluation planning, Community Partners in Arts Access
• Co-facilitated a session for Alliance for Nonprofit Management
• "Tracking and Evaluating Corporate Volunteerism," Corporate Volunteers of New York
• Presented at the Ohio Grantmaker's Forum
• N-Ten, the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network
• "Marketing your Organization's Impact," North Park University Axelson Center Symposium

Peter York is Vice President and Director of Evaluation at TCC Group. York specializes in: designing and implementing evaluations of foundation-supported multi-site initiatives, community building initiatives and social programs; conducting strategic reviews of best practices to inform the development and implementation of foundation grantmaking strategies; and providing technical assistance to grantees around evaluation, program design and strategic planning. A current focus of York's work is on assisting private foundations, corporations and nonprofit organizations with developing and using "evaluative learning" approaches, designs, methods and tools that can best answer, in a formative manner, the questions "what works" and "why?".

At the firm, York leads the firm's evaluation work with private and corporate philanthropies, and nonprofit organizations. Recent work includes facilitating evaluation capacity building for grantee organizations for funders like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Massachusetts Cultural Council, the California Endowment, and the Ontario Arts Council. He also designed "evaluative learning" systems for organizations like the Philadelphia Zoo, grantee organizations of the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust and Sun Valley United Way, and the New York Boys Club. He lead, designed, and conducted cluster evaluations of foundation-developed program initiatives like the Wachovia Foundation's Teachers and Teaching Initiative, the Deaconess Foundation's Impact Partnership initiative, and the Flint Funders' Collaborative's (Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Ruth Mott Foundation, Community Foundation of Greater Flint, and the United Way of Genesee County) "BEST" capacity building initiative, and also lead the development of cost-effective evaluative learning tools like the Core Capacity Assessment Tool.

York has conducted numerous presentations and workshops throughout the country to funders and nonprofit leaders on the topic of evaluation, and written reports and articles about evaluation approaches and substantive lessons learned (e.g., "Implementing a Theories of Change Evaluation in the Cleveland Community-Building Initiative" (Coulton, Milligan, York and Register. 1998); in, New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives, Vol. 2: Theory, Measurement and Analysis. Aspen Institute (New York); "Evaluating Capacity-building Efforts for Nonprofit Organizations." (Connolly and York, 2002). OD Practitioner, Vol. 34 (4)). In the Summer of 2005, Fieldstone Alliance published his book A Funder's Guide to Evaluation: Leveraging Evaluation to Improve Nonprofit Effectiveness.

York conducted his graduate studies at Case Western Reserve University's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, where he earned his Master's Degree in Social Service Administration and is "all but dissertation" in his Ph.D. work.

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