The Harvard Family Research Project separated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education to become the Global Family Research Project as of January 1, 2017. It is no longer affiliated with Harvard University.
Volume IX, Number 3, Fall 2003
Issue Topic: Evaluating Community-Based Initiatives
From the Director's Desk
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| Heather Weiss |
We revisit the inspiring and complex work of community change in this issue of The Evaluation Exchange. In 1997, when we last devoted an issue to community-based initiatives (CBIs), evaluation approaches that addressed the constraints of traditional evaluation techniques were largely new. Groundbreaking work was being done in projects like the Cleveland Community-Building Initiative and Banana Kelly, a community-based organization in the South Bronx. Infrastructure to support neighborhood-level change, such as the National Neighborhood Indicators Project, had recently been developed. And early lessons about generating local solutions to local problems along with alternative ways of understanding whether CBIs “work” were beginning to emerge.
The Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families has published several principal references on the development and evaluation of CBIs. With this issue we have sought to provide another forum for those engaged in place-based, antipoverty work to share recent strategies and discuss challenges.
Evaluation of comprehensive community initiatives is becoming more sophisticated. Evaluators and communities are joining to develop “new social technology, or set[s] of ideas and ways of implementing them,” as one of our authors, Xavier de Souza Briggs, states. Many communities have had success with their initiatives and have also come to value evaluation and build the capacity to carry it out.
However, implementing community-building initiatives has become even more challenging in today’s political and economic climate. Cutbacks and demands for outcomes often too ambitious for a given timeframe are testing the capacity and patience of stakeholders. These include evaluators who are challenged with maintaining objectivity while collaborating with other actors to improve an initiative.
And as several authors point out, there has never been greater need for evaluation approaches that take into account scientific rigor and experimental research while addressing the complexities of systems change work in community settings. The authors discuss new pathways for confronting this challenge.
Through The Evaluation Exchange we have witnessed and documented the evolution of greater pressure for results. Government agencies are watched more closely to ensure efficient spending of resources and proof of outcomes. Nonprofits have ratcheted up their management functions and foundations have been called on to show the social value of their work in return for privileged tax status. Communities connected to these entities are therefore under pressure too, enduring considerable risk as they craft comprehensive change goals.
Many of the articles stress what must not be lost in the drumbeat for accountability, namely “learning” from data and evaluation. Successful community building depends on stakeholders regularly applying data to problem solving. While learning may be an easily identified objective, achieving it requires data, time, and skill, which can sometimes be found internally, but must often be brought in from the outside. And learning must begin up front, as designers and evaluators build knowledge early on about how communities already plan, assess their progress, and apply information to decision making.
We think this issue of The Evaluation Exchange will provide you with thought-provoking ideas around these themes. As always, we welcome your thoughts and contributions.
Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D.
Founder & Director
Harvard Family Research Project