Participatory Evaluation for Community Development

In the past 10 to 15 years, social planners have become aware that development requires community participation. In projects where participants were responsible for the actions undertaken, conventional evaluations were protested because evaluations done by outsiders didn't capture the particular meaning that the projects (processes and results) had for its participants. This stimulated a new approach to evaluation commonly known as participatory evaluation.

Having worked in housing for the Argentine poor in the last 20 years, we'd done many evaluations in the conventional way and decided to join the participatory trend and develop different technical means. Our experiences suggest that certain necessary features exist in a participatory evaluation: participants evaluate, evaluation specialists facilitate their work by means of proposing methods and techniques, evaluation approaches and topics come from the expectations and concerns of participants, and proceedings are simple with clear stages and steps.

A poor group that had set up a housing cooperative in Argentina wanted to evaluate their history collectively and asked us for technical advice. Since they couldn't work easily with a written history of their long community experience, we thought of providing them with a visual synthesis of their process, which would mean they could look at their history, think about it, and draw lessons from it. The work involved several steps.

First, cooperative members, with our help, represented the remarkable moments and scenes from their community history by drawings, phrases, and pictures. We arranged these on a wall. We worked with simple, child-like images that were easy to draw, so anybody could incorporate ideas or situations and participate in building the panel. Pictures and phrases were also included.

Next, we expected participants to identify the turning points of their history and reflect on them. Looking over their history, they gradually reached consensus on eight critical events. They called these "rudder strokes" and signaled them with colored circles.

This first participatory evaluation with community groups showed us, among other things, that images and manual work enrich dialogues and lead to holistic thinking. For this reason, we went on experimenting with images applied to rather abstract topics, like the relationship among different actors involved in a social and housing development process. Several groups were pleased to participate in this kind of analysis.

Years before we'd approached this topic with conventional procedures. We took from those experiences a traditional way of representing the group structure (that is, small circles linked by lines). With that idea in mind, we gave each group a blank sheet of paper and small colored circles representing various stakeholders: cooperative associates, community representatives, volunteers, etc. The task was to play with circles on the sheet of paper until they represented the relationships among participants, and closeness or distance of stakeholders.

Members of the groups said: "It was fascinating to see and realize how we've changed, altogether, over the years." Working with images became for us a never-ending path. We found as many variations as one can imagine, discovering they turn on the power of evocation and freedom of expression.

Our next challenge was how we could train these community groups in different types of conventional procedures so they could work not only with opinions, perceptions, and ideas, but also verify and measure items of importance. We tried this with a group that had asked us for technical help in planning their housing process collectively. Once again we worked it out, little by little.

As a first step, we helped the group identify possible resources for a community housing process. They talked about it, wrote a list, and drew cards representing the many diverse possibilities. As a second step, we had them classify identified resources in a matrix by putting each card in a proper shelf. Shelves had been drawn on a paper panel glued to the wall.

The idea of using one shelf for each type of resource worked so well in showing the abstract conception of a matrix that they had no problem later handling different types of matrixes.

As a third step, they verified and quantified community resources by designing, with our help, a close-ended quantitative interview. Community representatives filled out the forms with the families they visited at their homes.

Later, we prepared a huge table where they tabulated the data obtained in the interviews. It was an enjoyable task, and an enabling one as well. Using the data, they carried out several other surveys, which backed up a housing proposal used to obtain funding soon afterwards.

Results of participatory community development and evaluation effort not only appeared at the end of a working process when a final report was elaborated; on the contrary, we often found useful outcomes during the processes:

• Sharing feelings, expectations, and ideas not typically exchanged day after day.
• Reconsidering group values-positive and negative.
• Collectively acquiring knowledge.
• Being aware of the relationship between particular problems and long-range problems of social and political context.

In the past 30 years, Latin American people have seen that as one economic crisis is followed by another one, massive social groups are increasingly being impoverished. Traditional means of dealing with those problems have become useless. At the same time, social projects turned into collective learning processes are little by little being recognized as a way to mobilize human resources. We're facing methodological questions we didn't think of a couple of years ago. The frontier to be pushed is enabling community groups to handle useful evaluation processes. The time has come to face a challenge of a different nature-to turn these group learning processes into larger community learning processes to match the magnitude of the changes needed and expected with the ability to produce them.

Identifying critical events.