Community-Based Evaluation

Community-based evaluation, also known as community evaluation, is evaluation focused on communities and conducted in partnership with the community. It involves project-level or community-level evaluation questions, community-sensitive evaluation methods and measures, and community-focused evaluation reporting and dissemination.

The community itself defines the “community” that is the focus of the evaluation. This community can be geographically based, such as a town or a neighborhood, or it can be spatially spread but linked by a similar characteristic, such as ethnicity, interest, or ideology. The community must be identifiable and [Page 70]organized to the extent that representatives from it can work as partners with the evaluation team.

Because communities generally think holistically about themselves and act on several aspects of the community at once, their evaluation questions tend to be ...