A Different Kind of Evaluation

Abstract

Many health and social programs and virtually all community development efforts share a common dilemma. The best of what they do—the transformations and healing they help catalyze, as well as their short-term contributions to longer-term outcomes—cannot be easily measured. This makes it difficult to demonstrate their successes and full worth to funders, Boards, and others.

Whatever else evaluation may be, it must concern itself with outcome, i.e., with the influence of a social program on its clients and/or its societal context (Morell, 1979, p. 1)