VicHealth’s world-first model for preventing violence against women, Generating Equality and Respect (GEAR), has won a prestigious national evaluation award.
The Australasian Evaluation Society (AES) yesterday (20 September) announced VicHealth as the winner of its Excellence in Evaluation Awards for the GEAR program, which built a world-first model for ‘saturating’ and sustaining prevention in a single location.
The GEAR program provides accessible tools and resources for local governments, workplaces and organisations across Australia and internationally to take violence against women prevention to the next level.
The awards acknowledge exemplary evaluation practice, systems or capacity building in Australasia. In recognising GEAR, the AES judges noted the high quality of evaluation and the potential for it to have a “major impact on the contribution to evaluation in its field of practice”.
In addition, the judges said GEAR’s evaluation epitomised the values of the AES.
VicHealth CEO Jerril Rechter said she was thrilled the GEAR program had been nationally recognised.
“GEAR demonstrated genuine innovation in primary prevention of violence against women. It was the first-ever place-based approach to prevention that went beyond a single setting, or a single organisation, and instead poured multiple tried and tested programs into one local area,” Ms Rechter said.
“We’re very proud of our contribution to the prevention of violence against women over the past 15 years, especially in the areas of research and evaluation.
“We want to thank all the project partners for participating in this evaluation. We’re delighted that it’s now helping others to strengthen their research efforts.”
Chief evaluator for the GEAR program and former Research Practice Leader at VicHealth, Dr Wei Leng Kwok, accepted the award on behalf of VicHealth at the AES conference in Perth yesterday.
“The prevention of violence against women requires genuine innovation in both program development and research. As part of GEAR, we used a participatory approach and as a result have created new insights and resources for others in the field to use,” Dr Kwok said.
“VicHealth has paved the way for other funders to invest in evaluation capacity building and it’s an honour to receive this recognition from the AES.”
For more information about GEAR visit https://www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/search/generating-equality-and-respect-resources
For more information about the Australasian Evaluation Society visit http://www.aes.asn.au/
VicHealth Media Contact
Cimara Doutré, VicHealth Senior Media Advisor | Tel 03 9667 1319 | M 0435 761 732 | E [email protected]
