Jeanette Harder

Jeanette Harder exemplifies all of the characteristics of an active supporter of community research. She has dedicated her career to serving the community by the creation of the Support and Training for the Evaluation of Programs (STEPs), whose mission is to promote evidence-informed decision making in community groups. Dr. Harder has formed more than 30 unique community partnerships through her STEPs program. Most of these non-profit organizations, her work helps these community group to improve services and programs they offer. I would like to nominate Dr. Jeanette Harder for the Collaborator of the Year Award. She exemplifies all of the characteristics of an active supporter of community research. While not an early stage investigator, Dr. Harder has dedicated her career to serving the community by the creation of the Support and Training for the Evaluation of Programs (STEPs), whose mission is to promote evidence-informed decision making in community groups. Dr. Harder has formed more than 30 unique community partnerships through her STEPs program. Most of these non-profit organizations, her work helps these community group to improve services and programs they offer. The primary obstacle overcome by Dr. Harder is establishing and sustaining the program evaluation center with no designated funding lines. To do this she has been a successful steward of whatever funds the community partner had available for evaluation, seeking external grants, or using a service learning experience to provide partial in-kind evaluation services. Dr. Harder has been able to maintain sustainability by finding the right balance of community partners and programmatic staff. She hires and trains students in her center to establish and complete program evaluations and needs assessments. Her group also completes capacity building trainings with community partners so they have the tools to perform their own level of programmatic evaluation. Dr. Harder revised the research and evaluation sequence in the Masters of Social Work program so that it engages students in her meaningful and complex research experiences. This approach has led more Masters of Social Work graduates pursuing evaluation related positions, thus fulfilling this unique need within the community. Besides providing direct evaluation services to various community health organizations, Dr. Harder’s program may be more impactful in other ways. She hosts a Community Partner gathering to bring related community representatives together and even teaches them a basic evaluation skill. Dr. Harder often works with community partners to publish the results of the evaluations, which creates a greater impact in the field when outside community health organizations have access to evaluation results. In her realm, Dr. Harder is certainly connected and serves as a champion for evidence-informed practices, particularly related with at-risk youth organizations. I cannot say enough about Dr. Harder’s resolve to use her skills for improving the programming of community health organizations in Omaha and the state of Nebraska. I admire her heart for at-risk children and her ability to remain optimistic amidst bleak funding outlooks. She strives to work collaboratively both within and outside of the University, and prepares and sends students into our local community health programs to make their own impact. For all of these reasons I strongly support Dr. Jeanette Harder’s nomination for the Community Engagement and Outreach Core of the Great Plains IDeA-CTR Network’s Collaborator of the Year award.