Cost Analysis of the Duke Endowment Summer Literacy Initiative
AIR partnered with the Duke Endowment Foundation to understand the impact and associated costs of a summer literacy program housed in rural North Carolina churches. AIR used the ingredients approach to estimate the per-child cost of the program an explored the variation in costs across the state.
While many resources used to implement this program were volunteer-based, the AIR study team still considered volunteer-based resources a cost of the program when using the societal perspective (as recommended by the Standards for the Economic Evaluation of Educational and Social Programs). Information from this cost study allowed the Duke Endowment Fund to think strategically about how programs are funded, what it costs to facilitate the programs, and how those costs vary across the state.
