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Andrew Mott, Director of the Community Learning Project and former Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, stresses the importance of building on existing grassroots approaches to assessment and learning.

Nowadays progress in low-income communities depends heavily on the success of grassroots groups in taking the initiative to improve their neighborhoods. No other organizations, public or private, are prepared to take on this extraordinarily important role.

This situation greatly increases the importance of developing ways to help grassroots organizations assess their work, examine what’s working and what isn’t, and learn how to strengthen their organizations and increase their impact.

Evaluations of grassroots efforts must therefore be designed to help organizations learn and build capacity. For foundations that fund community organizing and other grassroots efforts, an emphasis on internal learning and capacity building is crucial. Without strong, increasingly knowledgeable, and competent organizations to take the lead, foundation grants simply cannot lead to the desired impact.

This approach poses a major challenge to conventional thinking about evaluation. While funders must continue to be concerned about tracking and assessing performance, they must become at least equally concerned about designing evaluation systems that build grantees’ capacity and help them learn. For most funders, this view requires a radical rethinking of their approach to evaluation and their relationship with their grantees.

First, funders must understand the internal systems that a grassroots group may have already developed to track and reflect on its performance. Without understanding how an organization currently learns, a funder risks undermining learning systems that the organization has found useful. Grantees are often forced to set up an entirely separate evaluation system to satisfy grant requirements, a step that can weaken rather than strengthen an organization and can jeopardize the grant’s success.

Many funders and professional evaluators fail to recognize the discipline and thoroughness of some community organizations in developing internal reporting and assessment systems. Most community organizers, for example, write weekly reports quantifying such accomplishments as how many new people they met with, how many they recruited as members, and how many assumed new leadership roles. Many also require periodic written reflections from their organizers. These reflections make self-assessment routine and provide the basis for discussion, critique, and suggestions by the organizer’s peers and supervisors. These are valuable systems that should be built on and reinforced. Any supplementary assessment techniques should be made as compatible and complementary as possible.

Funders and external evaluators should understand equally well the roles that organizing networks, technical assistance groups, organizational development consultants, and other learning partners may play in helping grantees with assessment and learning. Although these groups are not likely to think of their work as “evaluation,” they enable grassroots organizations to assess their organizational development, operations, and impact.

Some grassroots organizations turn to peers for help in assessing their work and exploring possible improvements. They see great advantages in having people whom they trust and who have “been in their shoes” take a serious look at their operations and provide honest feedback on what could be strengthened, what problems are emerging, and what activities should be expanded or rethought. Like support organizations and consultants that work extensively in similar communities, peers can bring great practical insight and knowledge to the task of assessment. These learning partners offer “added value” to assessment by drawing from their own experience and knowledge of how other grassroots groups have addressed similar community issues and organizational dilemmas.

Many groups use another strategy for peer learning. They meet regularly with peers, either informally or as a formalized peer learning group or learning circle. This cross-fertilization of ideas exposes each group to ways other groups have tackled similar issues, thus stimulating learning and creativity. Such peer learning also fosters self-assessment as the participants evaluate other groups’ ideas and strategies against their own. Peer learning strategies commonly persuade an organization to change in significant ways.

Some participatory evaluators approach organizational assessments using techniques that closely resemble those used by organizational development specialists and other learning partners who are not “evaluators.” These participatory evaluators offer advantages over peers or partners as they have stronger methodological skills, a more distant relationship to the group, and usually greater credibility with external audiences. They may be chosen by the group and enjoy the advantages of trust and candor. Those who are truly participatory routinely engage leaders and staff in every aspect of the evaluation, from design through analysis.

Related Resource


Mott, A. (2003). Evaluation: Good news for funders. Washington, DC: Neighborhood Funders Group.

All these approaches—self-assessments, assessments by peers and partners, and assessments by evaluators who are truly participatory—offer great advantages for grassroots organizations. These approaches help groups learn, adapt, and strengthen themselves as organizations. They fit naturally with the organizations’ own priorities and learning processes, and thus avoid, or at least limit, the tensions, lack of candor, and perceived lack of relevance and value that often afflict external evaluations.

Such approaches to evaluation are usually overlooked in the U.S. However, they are more commonly accepted in the global South and among international nongovernmental organizations where years of pioneering have led to growing sophistication in participatory monitoring and assessment techniques and to linking evaluation with organizational development.

These strategies deserve far stronger support within the American evaluation community and from funders in the US When properly structured they can result in assessments based on relationships of greater candor and increased access to the experience and insight of the people most involved in the evaluated work. Furthermore, unlike traditional evaluations, these learning partnerships also usually result in stronger organizations, more effective programs and issue work, and greater impact—the ultimate goals that all funders and grantees share.

Andrew Mott
Director
Community Learning Project
One Dupont Circle, NW, Ste. 700
Washington, DC 20036
Tel: 202-736-5834
Email: andy.mott@aspeninst.org

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