Program Evaluation: Empowering Youth Through Dance at Culture Shock LA
Culture Shock LA is a nonprofit hip-hop dance organization that empowers youth through performance, leadership, and community-building. My team and I collaborated with CSLA to develop a comprehensive evaluation plan for their three youth companies — Mini Shock, Mighty Shock, and Future Shock — to assess both program effectiveness and long-term sustainability.
The youth programs had never been formally evaluated since inception, and our goal was to offer a structured framework to:
Assess growth in dance, leadership, and social-emotional development
Evaluate the organization’s sustainability strategies
Engage stakeholders to drive meaningful and actionable change
Evaluation Goals
Youth-Level: Measure growth in youth’s technical dance ability, leadership skills, and sense of community belonging
Organization-Level: Understand what strategies are in place for sustainable programming and community visibility
Methods & Approach
We adopted a participatory, mixed-methods evaluation design to ensure inclusivity and depth:
Logic Model Development: Created to align stakeholders around a shared theory of change, detailing inputs, activities, outputs, and both short- and long-term outcomes
Quantitative Tools:
Youth Leadership Life Skills Development Scale (YLLSDS) – Pre/post surveys measuring communication, decision-making, and interpersonal skills
Structured trainer journals – Weekly observations tracking progress in dance skills
Qualitative Tools:
Semi-structured interviews with youth participants, directors, and board members
Feedback forms from past youth cohorts
Thematic analysis on community belonging and program impact
Key Learning Themes
Empowerment through Culture: Hip-hop was not just a dance form but a cultural tool for building community, confidence, and personal growth (Travis et al., 2022; Sulé, 2016)
Peer Mentorship as Leadership: The “Troop Buddy” system paired older dancers with younger participants to foster leadership through mentorship (Kane, 2014)
Stakeholder-Centric Design: By incorporating directors, trainers, parents, and students at every step, we ensured the evaluation plan reflected the true needs and values of the community
Outcomes & Deliverables
A fully developed evaluation plan with tools, timeline, and data collection strategy
Stakeholder-informed logic model mapping goals to measurable outcomes
Mixed-methods data analysis plan for youth development and organizational growth
Communication strategy for sharing results with diverse stakeholders (youth, parents, directors, board)