Philadelphia, PA 19147

Phone: 215-592-0878

Fax: 215-592-0664

Dr. Gambone is a sociologist who has been conducting research on youth development, community mobilization, youth policy and program effectiveness for the last twelve years. She is currently the president of Gambone & Associates, a youth policy and research consulting firm, working with a number of organizations assisting them in developing planning, management and evaluation strategies and tools for a broad range of youth development initiatives. These include: AED’s Center for Youth Development and Policy Research—where she has been bringing her knowledge of youth development to planning, technical assistance and evaluation activities for their community mobilization effort; the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Change Initiatives – where she authored one chapter on measurement issues in researching community initiatives and another on a theory of change to guide community action for youth and measuring youth development at the community level; with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation—where she is the principal investigator managing a theory of change driven evaluation of a district wide school reform effort in Kansas City Kansas;

In 1999 Gambone & Associates and the Institute for Research and Reform in Education (IRRE) began a cooperative project called the Community Action for Youth Project (CAYP). Dr. Gambone and Dr. Connell co-direct the work of CAYP. The mission of CAYP is threefold. First, it aims to disseminate through publication, presentation and consultation a community action framework for youth development based on both academic and applied research on youth and communities, and on the field work of the two organizations’ presidents (Gambone and Connell, respectively). CAYP is also developing tools to support the use of this framework by funders, managers, planners, evaluators and technical assistance providers working with community-based youth initiatives and programs. Finally, CAYP provides direct technical assistance to community-based youth initiatives who are using this framework to guide their work.

CAYP’s current efforts using the community action framework include: a partnership with the Community Network for Youth Development co-directing a project using the framework and a theory of change process with youth serving organizations to develop indicators, measures and organizational improvement plans to strengthen youth development program outcomes; assisting the three communities participating in the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Kellogg Youth Initiative Partnership (KYIP) to use the community action framework to assess community conditions and create community wide strategic plans; and work for the National Urban League directing a technical assistance project using the framework and theory of change process to plan a community wide initiative for youth development.

In her prior work at Public/Private Ventures, as Deputy Director of Research, Dr. Gambone was the principal investigator of a number of multi-million dollar, multi-site evaluations, including: their community change demonstration—Community Change for Youth Development (CCYD); the study of Voluntary Youth-Serving Organizations and how they contribute to the development of healthy adolescents; the evaluation of The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Plain Talk initiative -- a community based teen pregnancy prevention initiative; and a study for the U.S. Department of Labor on how to bring a developmental perspective to youth employment training programs. Before joining P/PV in 1990, Dr. Gambone was a senior social science analyst for the United States General Accounting Office. Her Ph.D in sociology is from Princeton University.