FINDING “THE SPACE IN BETWEEN”

Community-based programs and social

services are different from community change efforts in many ways, but we would be well served if we allowed the answer to the question “Does it work?” to be a little more complicated than it now is. Programs that seek individual-level im- pact need support and frames and spaces for thinking about the larger efforts that they contribute to, efforts that are about changing the community.

Context matters. History matters. Partnership across traditional power stra- ta matters. This, I think, is what so many anti–domestic-violence practitioners and scholars mean when they decry the profes- sionalization of what began as a social jus- tice movement and the resultant myopia

around outcomes. It is why mental health practices for people who live in entrenched poverty may need to be fundamentally dif- ferent from what is generally studied.

In my work, I see organizations whose benefit to their participants comes from sitting in a place that straddles these worlds. These programs evolve and change with the community, and they are agents of change: One in New York was able to support a community’s reclaiming of a playground (traditionally a commu- nity development effort) because it had relationships with the gang members who were making families feel unsafe there.

Programs that straddle the individual and contextual approaches have specific participants and target populations, to be sure, but their boundaries are also some- what porous. One in Missouri understands that kids involved in juvenile justice have families that are sources of both strength and challenge, and that helping kids often means spending a lot of time with families on issues like housing and utility bills—a far cry from most juvenile justice work.

These programs hold themselves ac- countable for specific outcomes but also realize that their impact goes beyond the number of people housed, or battered women relocated, or mothers who have completed a child development program. Their role is sometimes that of a gathering place, a place where new social networks form and where self-efficacy and stability are enhanced because people show up and help build the organizations even as they obtain counseling or job training.

Current evaluation approaches reflect and reinforce differing ways of thinking about how we move the needle on pov- erty and its accompanying social ills. How often do we hear calls for more coordina- tion among community efforts? We are far

more likely to have meaningful coordina- tion, and also coordination that creates so- cial good that is greater than the sum of its parts, if we stop positioning social services as static, proven constants and community change as dynamic, emergent, and deeply process oriented. The best services are some of both. And perhaps the best com- munity change is, too.

Brown’s clear-eyed assessment of the state of community change evaluation in this volume gives me hope that there is a space to blend the social services and community change approaches to evalu- ation. Evaluation of the great social ser- vices that must be part of any community change work is about results and context and history and partnership. In the same way that the major funders who support community change efforts are matching their evaluation principles to the prin- ciples that drive that change, perhaps they can also come together to examine how to make the evaluation of social ser- vices richer and more meaningful. It will take real work to adapt evaluation tools and approaches for meaningful use by a $100,000 organization doing youth devel- opment work, for example, but it is impor- tant to do so.

So I close with a wish—that the community-based service providers, so prevalent in many low-income communi- ties, are not only allowed but also encour- aged to engage in evaluations that align with broader community goals, where they are held accountable for helping to create change beyond the bounds of their programs while also being understood for the value they deliver to individual participants. This is not about expanding their work. It is about creating spaces where evaluation philosophies can come together.

The space I suggest is not one of watered-down or diminished evaluative principles but, rather, the creation of some- thing new. It is a hybrid of evaluation phi- losophies that can guide real, comprehen- sive community change work. In so doing, we can also begin to move away from false polarities of practice. Community change work is evolutionary but not chaotic. Social services are dynamic, too—not static. Both deal with the mess of real life from very different vantage points, in very different ways. For the people who live and work in these communities, however, individuals and contexts are not fundamentally differ- ent. Evaluation shouldn’t be either.e

Response Essay

By Claudia J. Coulton Case Western University

Cleveland, Ohio The impression I take away from Prudence

Brown’s insightful account of evaluation and learning is that community change ef- forts have increasingly adopted evaluation methods that are participatory and practi- cal. Their findings are informing partners and funders so they can make sound deci- sions and take effective action.

However, the chapter also suggests to me the importance of finding a bal- ance between evaluation utilization and developing knowledge about important questions for the field. What more could evaluation tell us about how poor neigh- borhoods can become better places for the people who live there and the regions in which they are located? Are current investments in evaluation targeted cor- rectly to contribute to the wider body of knowledge about policies and practices

that have potential to improve conditions in poor neighborhoods?

Drawing on Brown’s analysis, I see several opportunities to increase the eval- uation effort toward addressing this bigger picture. These include explicating mod- els of community change; distinguishing methods and types of community change; measuring community outcomes as well as programmatic ones; understanding the larger context of community change; and evaluating for the bigger picture.