Evaluating Community Impact

Over the last twenty years, people interested in building strong communities have been making an important shift. Eager to “move the needle” on our quality of life issues, they are experimenting with new ways to create mutually reinforcing community-wide strategies that yield big changes as opposed to hoping that the individual efforts of organizations and services end up being more than the sum of their parts. This new approach to community change requires a different way to evaluate.

Conventional evaluation techniques typically focus on discrete programs and services and are carried out by external experts. Evaluation practices from the private sector are narrowly concerned with “operational” and “return on investment” of their organization rather than the perspective of outcomes for the entire community. Neither is suitable for the scale and complexity of community impact. Both have a tendency to approach evaluation as a mechanical exercise in accountability rather than a process of community learning. After many iterations of trying to “do the old stuff on steroids”, the field of change-makers is self-correcting. We are experimenting with new ways of measuring change, exploring who is responsible for outcomes, developing methods that can keep up with the fast-moving pace of community change activities, alternative approaches for getting changemakers involved in the actual assessment process, and using the results to drive new thinking, better strategies and deeper impact.

Foundations of Evaluating Community Impact

Join Tamarack's Jean-Marie Chapeau, Consulting Director of Evaluating Impact, in this new online course designed to build a foundation of knowledge and practice for a participatory evaluation.

This course is available to use at your own pace, but you'll be learning alongside a diverse group of Tamarack Institute learners. Engage in comments and questions on the online platform, and join Jean-Marie for monthly small group coaching to get more personalized feedback and insight.

Meet the Director

Jean-Marie Chapeau is the Consulting Director Evaluating impact at the Tamarack Institute. Deeply convinced that local and collaborative approaches are an essential lever in solving complex social issues, Jean-Marie has been involved in community development and social change for 25 years.

Current Evaluating Community Impact Themes Being Explored:

Getting to practice and keeping it simple
Empowering communities in their evaluation processes
Participatory approaches in virtual mode
Equity lens on evaluation and learning practice
Transformation evaluation - Future thinking - System mapping
Communicating impact (impact reports and communication strategies)