Strategy, Implementation, Extremism 

Countering violent extremism (CVE) requires addressing the conditions and reducing the underlying factors that give rise to radicalization and recruitment. Evaluations are critical for assessing the impact of community-based CVE programs and informing decisions about how to allocate often-scarce resources. Choosing the most rigorous evaluation approach a program can sustain will provide its staff and funders with the most accurate view possible of whether the program is achieving its goals or whether efforts should be continued, scaled up, or discontinued. The RAND Program Evaluation Toolkit for Countering Violent Extremism was designed to help CVE program staff overcome common challenges to evaluating and planning improvements to their programs. This report summarizes the complementary methods used to develop the toolkit: a review of the evaluation literature on CVE programs; the development of a taxonomy of general types of CVE programs, their activities, and their target audiences; and interviews with CVE program managers to identify data collection practices and challenges to evaluation. This was followed by a pilot test of the draft toolkit with a subset of CVE program managers. Feedback from this pilot test informed revisions to the toolkit to ensure that it would serve as a helpful resource for CVE programs in evaluating their activities, informing resource allocations and program improvements, and — ultimately — reducing the risk of violent extremism in their communities. 

Xi.; 51 p.; illus.; 28 cm