There are also research and evaluation imperatives that flow from these ideas that are quite different from the traditional approach that researchers and evaluators like myself have tended to take in the past. Loosely speaking, we are trained to follow the medical research model as closely as we can. We would like to randomize selection of participants in programs. We would like to have experimental and control groups. We would like to track things over a period of time and have a lot of information that we can compare from one place to another and from one time to another. In the end, with that orienta- tion, the medical model promises a better chance of defining the actual impact and the outcome of a particular strategy and a particular intervention. I have lost confidence in the idea that this will work in the community revitalization world. I have not lost confidence in the idea that it can work in other kinds of contexts or that it can work with respect to a particular, relatively narrow intervention within a community. But I am arguing that the medical model of inquiry will not help us decide whether or not a particular community revitalization effort based on a particular strategy design for that juris- diction is doing what we want it to do. Something different is needed. I will try to state some general parameters defining what that orientation ought to be.
First, one of the premises of the traditional ap- proach that I was describing is that the evaluation and research component is of the stand-back type. We stand back here and look at you implementing an intervention, and we make our notes and obser- vations, and at the end of your intervention we will say it did or did not work. We will do a process kind of orientation as well and say, “Well, the rea- son it didn’t work is that they didn’t do this or they didn’t do that, or they didn’t cover their bases,” and
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so on. I do not think that is good enough. What is going to be needed is for the research and evalua- tion component to participate intimately with the programmatic component from the beginning. I do not think there is any point in expecting research and evaluation to produce useful information about a community revitalization program unless partici- pation of the research and evaluation people starts at the beginning. If you admit this, the nature of what comes next has changed because you are no longer the detached, objective observer. You get drawn into being a participant with the program- matic effort. This is the price, and it is a high price, that has to be paid for the orientation I am promot- ing. That price is that you lose objectivity and your independence, because you get drawn in and have a vested interest in the outcome. For example, as you are going along with this process, you become involved in midcourse corrections. You can say in conjunction with the program people—let’s say after 10 percent of the time has gone by and 10 per- cent of the program has been implemented—that it looks like you are going in the wrong direction and maybe a change is needed.
If we are shooting an astronaut to the Moon and I am evaluating that program for its effectiveness, and I see when she is halfway there that she is going to hit Mars, not the Moon, what am I going to do? Can I stand back and say, “Boy, am I going to have a story to write when this is over,” when that astronaut is on Mars but she ought to be on the Moon? Of course I am not going to do that. I am going to say that a midcourse correction must be made because we want this ship to go to the Moon, not to Mars. We need to do the same thing in respect to community revitalization. Once I start doing that, I am no longer a traditional evaluator. I’ve lost my independence and my objectivity. To me that no longer matters. I know it matters to many researchers and evaluators, and I understand that point of view. But to me it no longer matters because I want what I do to have an effect and to help the program. I view the role that we can play as researchers and evaluators to be one in which we will make a contribution to programmatic success in the present and not one that will only turn in a scorecard and maybe provide a guide to future programmatic design.
Many things will be affected by this change in ori- entation. The notions of technology transfer and programs of proven effectiveness are two of them. I do not look to them as being the primary out- comes of what we can do in the research and evalu- ation world. I also think that my orientation will produce outcome evaluations that are probabilistic rather than definitive. It will be “iffy.” It will be extremely difficult to be definite about what the outcomes actually are and what one’s own objectiv- ity is with respect to them. Further, the timeframe for most interventions is probably unrealistic. To some extent, this is a Federal funding issue, a political issue, and it is of extreme importance. The timeframe that most Federal programs have in mind is 1 or 2 years at the most, occasionally a bit longer. Weed and Seed has had a 3- to 4-year timeframe. At the end of that time, an evaluation will be written, saying whether the program suc- ceeded or failed. I am not sure that is even long enough to expect a community to start to turn around. How about a decade? How about 15 years? The problem with that, of course, is that your political capital may not last that long. This is a very difficult issue to deal with.
This suggests that not every distressed community is a candidate for community revitalization. There are some preconditions needed to determine whether a community can be turned around. These should be considered in the problem definition stage when the strategic orientation toward revital- ization is being set up in a locally specific context. We should expect to find that certain communities that clearly are distressed to the point of needing intervention are nevertheless not likely to respond to the kind of interventions that can be mounted by programs such as Weed and Seed.
For example, the central tenet of Weed and Seed is that a community can be strengthened by reducing criminal activity and increasing social programs. This approach is likely to make a community more resistant to the resurgence of crime. Implicit in this view is the idea that long-term residence in the community is likely for a significant number of its inhabitants. It is through these residents that a com- munity will revitalize itself. If, on the other hand, a troubled community is characterized by high turn- over, with residents’ objectives being to leave as
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quickly as possible, then it is difficult to have confi- dence that the Weed and Seed approach can have much long-term effect.
I’ll conclude by restating three main points. First, how things are organized at the Federal level is critical. The effort must extend beyond agencies, and it must be strategic. Second, the approach that we want to undertake must be communitywide. It must be a saturation model, multifaceted and com- munity driven. We cannot impose anything from the Federal level. It has got to come from the bottom
up. And third, we have got to have what we are calling a dynamic strategic assessment and feed- back approach to research and evaluation where researchers like us participate from the very begin- ning and continue until the very end. We must be more than detached observers: We must be directly involved.
Note
1. Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems, New York: H. Holt, 1927.
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