How Should We Evaluate Community Initiatives?

Abstract

Community initiatives are efforts to assemble coalitions to carry out multi-sectoral interventions to effect broad community changes. Often, diverse actors bring disparate interests, ambiguous goals, and fuzzy theories of change into loose alliances to design and implement interventions. As time goes on, actors, goals, and strategies change. Initiatives follow the logics of participation and action more than that of research. These conditions make evaluation problematic. At the same time, many community initiatives have few, if any, resources for formal evaluation. This article discusses these evaluation predicaments and outlines a practical approach that takes into account the logics of participation, action, and research. Case material from the Southeast (Baltimore) Education Task Force illustrates these challenges and this approach.

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