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Session Title: Building Communities in the Context of Transitional Countries: Challenges and Approaches for Program Evaluation

Panel Session 771 to be held in International Ballroom C on Saturday, November 10, 12:10 PM to 1:40 PM

Sponsored by the International and Cross-cultural Evaluation TIG

Chair(s):

Robert payday loan  Stake payday loan ,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,  stake@uiuc.edu

Abstract: This session will present some methodological cornerstones identified by practicing evaluators with regards to civil society strengthening and community development program. It also explores the roles that evaluation can play for such projects' implementing institutions and beneficiary communities. The panel also presents a hands-on experience of community program evaluation from four transitional countries: Macedonia, Slovakia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Re-constructing Program Theory for the Post-ante Evaluation of the Ukraine-Belarus Partnership for Community Development Kseniya payday loan  Temnenko payday loan ,  Eurasia Foundation,  ktemnenko@eurasia.kiev.ua Ukraine-Belarus Partnership for Community Development was a three-year joint program of the Eurasia Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the International Renaissance Foundation. It was implemented between 2003 and 2006. The goal of the Program was to foster community development initiatives in Belarus through cooperative activities between representatives of Belarusian local communities, such as local councils of deputies, NGO representatives, media and independent analytical centers, and their counterparts in Ukraine. As evaluators discovered there was a multi-faceted definition of the 'community' term: 1) a physical locality; 2) a network of experts/practitioners within the country; 3) cross-border network aimed at some form of civic activity. Beyond that there was a separate understanding of this term among Belarusian beneficiaries. The presentation discusses approaches of re-constructing program theory and undertaking post-ante evaluation in the absence of baseline data, and in restrictive political environment.

Institute for Sustainable Communities' Local Partnership Grantees in Macedonia: An Example of Mid-course Corrections in Evaluation Design as a Result of Evolving Understandings of Community and Capacity Gretchen payday loan  Elias payday loan ,  Institute for Sustainable Communities,  gelias@iscvt.org Designed in response to a requirement by the donor agency (USAID), the Local Partnership component of ISC's Civil Society Strengthening Program (CSSP) in Macedonia is intended to cultivate community partnerships at the local level. It takes place in the context of the government's recent decentralization, and donor recognition of the need to build local government capacity and momentum for increased reliance on community-level solutions to local problems ISC solicited applications for Local Partnership projects involving community-level partnerships without articulating our own definition of 'community' or anticipating the range of possible definitions that our grantees would propose. Therefore, they proposed communities that didn't fit with the measurement tools we'd been planning to use. In addition, the data collection methods and tools we had originally proposed were beyond the capacity of LPP grantees. In this presentation, I discuss how ISC has handled this challenge in redesigning its M&E activities and methods.

Enabling Roma Children to Attend Ordinary Schools Robert payday loan  Stake payday loan ,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,  stake@uiuc.edu A Roma settlement in eastern Slovakia, surrounded by the village of Jarovnice, survives despite risk of flooding from the nearby stream, and the persistent perception among villagers in Jarovnice that the Roma are 'separate'. Long after communism, little progress has been made toward assimilation. Perhaps a strong sense of community exists, but ordered, without common definition of membership. One contributing factor was that the settlement's children were consistently found unready--linguistically, culturally, and intellectually-for admission to first grade. To improve equity of educational opportunity, the Wide Open School Foundation, funded by the Open Society Institute, worked to prepare Roma children for elementary school. Despite limited funds, the Foundation found ways to engage Roma mothers in preparing their children, even in areas of which the women themselves were ignorant. The evaluation task was to explore how the foundation stimulated new perceptions and whether the community's own definition of community was changing.