Empowerment Evaluation

Baseline Comparison and a Culture of Evidence

The “taking stock” step creates a baseline self-assessment of the program. The “plans for the future” step represents the intervention or “treatment.” Conventional evaluation tools, such as interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, and observations, are used to determine whether the strategies are working or accomplishing the group goals. These mini-tests represent an ongoing feedback mechanism, providing corrective feedback for decision making. Program staff members and participants can make midcourse corrections before “it is too late.” If the strategies are not working based on the evaluative feedback, then it is time to change the strategies. Approximately 3 to 6 months later, another formal “taking stock” session is conducted. The first “taking stock” findings are compared with the follow-up or second “taking stock” findings to document change over time. Once again this is used for corrective feedback, confirming the effectiveness of certain strategies that should be maintained or enhanced and the ineffectiveness of other strategies that need to be revisited and changed. The cyclical process helps to internalize the logic of evaluation and builds an evaluative folk culture as well as a culture of evidence.

Principles

Empowerment evaluation is secondarily about methods and specific activities. Communities may adopt a 3-step approach, as discussed earlier, or a 10-step approach, such as the Getting to Outcomes model. In addition, there are many specific tools and methods that can be used to conduct empowerment evaluations, ranging from online survey software to video storytelling. However, these are tools to accomplish only specific objectives. Empowerment evaluation practice is a reflection or manifestation of empowerment evaluation principles and values.

The 10 principles of empowerment evaluation are the following:

• 1.
  Improvement
• 2.
  Community ownership
• 3.
  Inclusion
• 4.
  Democratic participation
• 5.
  Social justice
• 6.
  Community knowledge
• 7.
  Evidence-based strategies
• 8.
  Capacity building
• 9.
  Organizational learning
• 10.
  Accountability

These principles guide every part of empowerment evaluation, from conceptualization to implementation. The principles of empowerment evaluation serve as a lens to focus an evaluation. For example, the principle of inclusion recommends erring on the side of including rather then excluding members of the community, even though fiscal and scheduling constraints might suggest otherwise. The capacity-building principle reminds the evaluator to provide community members with an opportunity to collect their own data, even though it might initially be faster and easier for the evaluator to collect the same information. The accountability principle guides community members to hold each other accountable and also situates the evaluation within the context of external requirements. The community is accountable for reaching specific standards or delivering specific results, products, and/or outcomes.

...