1067: Empowerment Evaluation: A Community Engagement Approach

Empowerment evaluation is a interest holder involvement approach to evaluation. It is aimed at learning and improvement. Empowerment evaluations help people learn how to help themselves and become more self-determined, by learning how to evaluate their own programs and initiatives. Key concepts include a critical friend (evaluator helping to guide community evaluations), cycles of reflection and action, and a community of learners. Principles guiding empowerment evaluation range from improvement to capacity building and accountability. The basic steps of empowerment evaluation include: 1) mission: establishing a unifying purpose; 2) taking stock: measuring growth and improvement; and 3) planning for the future: establishing goals and strategies to achieve objectives, as well as credible evidence to monitor change. An evaluation dashboard is used to compare actual performance with quarterly milestones and annual goals. The role of the evaluator is that of a coach or facilitator in an empowerment evaluation since the group is in charge of the evaluation itself. The workshop is open to colleagues new to evaluation as well as seasoned evaluators. It highlights how empowerment evaluation produces measurable outcomes with social justice-oriented case examples ranging from eliminating tuberculosis in India to fighting for food justice throughout the United States. Additional examples include empowerment evaluations conducted with high-tech companies such as Google and Hewlett-Packard as well as work conducted in rural Arkansas and squatter settlements in South Africa. Employing lectures, activities, demonstrations, and discussions, the workshop will introduce the theory, concepts, principles, steps of empowerment evaluation, and technological tools of the trade. (See TED Talk about empowerment evaluation for more details.)