EOA - evaluation services offered

EOA has a team of trained evaluators, led by myself, including specialists in housing, ethnic minority involvement and monitoring, managements systems, mediation, regeneration, social enterprise, enterprise development, social impact assessment, charitable law and culture. For most evaluations two evaluators, chosen to best suit the client’s needs, work together.

Evaluations start at £5,000 plus VAT and expenses. This includes preparation, a stakeholder workshop, some follow-up interviews and a written report. Longitudinal evaluations with a series of workshops and interviews spread over the lifetime of a programme are also available.

If you are interested, please contact me on zoe at eastoxford.com (replacing the "at" with an @ and deleting the spaces) or ring 01865 203367

Scene Setting for an Empowerment Workshop

Scene setting for the evaluation workshop is crucial. Fetterman suggests that this take place in “an open session with as many staff members and participants as possible.” Fetterman, 2001. East Oxford Action's experience of facilitated workshops such as these are they are best when the numbers are limited to about fifteen. This raises problems for large programmes. Our experience is also that the process of inviting people to the workshop offers an opportunity for control – ie only inviting people who will support your point of view. Whilst all measures are taken to prevent this – through explaining the evaluation process to those doing the invitations – it is also useful to keep an eye open for this during the workshop and perhaps do some follow-up work if appropriate.

An agreement by all those involved to subscribe to openness and mutual respect needs to be established at the beginning – the evaluator making clear that everyone is equal. East Oxford Action has experienced problems with this, for example where cultural barriers prevent one group from speaking in front of another. Another example is that of a project evaluation taken with people with mental health problems, where it was felt that a fully mixed workshop would be too stressful for those involved. In this circumstance we ran a series of workshops with the different groups (if the participants are likely to be intimidated by the process), whilst ensuring that the different groups heard what each other are saying and eventually run a mixed group workshop once trust had been built up. With regeneration programmes made up of several projects delivering different elements of the programme, it is necessary to undertake several workshops looking at the overall aim and the projects' aims.

The choice of time and venue for the evaluation workshop is also important – where possible it should be designed to suit the needs of everyone, but where this is not possible to suit the needs of the most vulnerable in the group.

Introduction to Participatory and Empowerment Evaluation

“Participatory monitoring and evaluation is not just a matter of using participatory techniques within a conventional monitoring and evaluation setting. It is about radically rethinking who initiates and undertakes the process, and who learns or benefits from the findings.” Institute of Development Studies, 1998

Participatory and empowerment evaluation places all stakeholders at its heart, especially those who will live with the results of the programme. In such an approach the evaluation is not seen as a final judgement on whether the project or programme has been a success or not, but as a means to help people help themselves and improve their programmes. In this approach the evaluator is not an external judge but a critical friend, holding up a mirror to those involved in delivering the project, and facilitating the generation of solutions to problems and a more accurate self-image.

Participatory approaches to evaluation are used extensively by organisations working in the Third World, such as OXFAM and the United Nations Development Programme. The characteristics of participatory evaluation as opposed to more traditional evaluations are:

• the participation if a broad range of stakeholders rather than a limited number in a traditional evaluation

• the focus on participants: residents, project staff and stakeholders, rather than funders and programme managers

• the evaluator as facilitator and critical friend, rather than as expert

• a focus on learning through the process rather than on accountability/judgement

• the involvement of the participants in collecting the data, with the support of the evaluator, rather than the outside experts doing so.

There are many ways of delivering participatory evaluation and many tools for the job, especially rapid appraisal techniques, which will be familiar to the world of community development and regeneration.

Extract from paper by Zoe Brooks CEO East Oxford Action, 2007