Community Project Evaluation: Achieving Goals & Building Density
1) Analyzing the Achievement of Planned Objectives:
To analyze the degree of achievement of planned objectives or tasks, it is necessary to objectify achievements through the formulation of indicators that allow us to evaluate the performance of activities. These indicators should be established from the first phase of the project throughout the community. Hence, to evaluate, the community meets its own image, diagnoses itself better, and can correctly perceive its own internal dynamics of development.
2) Analyzing the Relational Density Level Reached:
In community social work, it is not only about achieving a goal but also about mobilizing the community. It’s about training the community to discuss and select targets, projects, and tasks collectively. Increasing the relational density, cohesion, and coordination among the various people who comprise a goal from outside the community or to an internal target is a basic goal in any professional involvement in the area in question. How? Contrast the data we obtained in the initial diagnosis with the results that we see at the end of the project, the evaluation session.
3) Setting New Targets for a Community with Improved Collective Leverage:
The evaluation is not an end in the life of the community social worker. Precisely what it does is improve the relationship patterns that, because without such direct intervention of the social worker, the community can become aware of their resources, its limits and possibilities, and establish collective strategies that enable them to improve their living conditions.
Keep in mind that in many cases, the problems encountered stem from inappropriate behavior patterns of the population itself, which can be modified by its objectivity, analysis, and community-wide involvement in the process thus change. The improvements made in one aspect should be the starting point for further improvement in the rest of their lives.
Throughout this process, the theoretical principle that we made when analyzing the dynamics of social group work remains in place: community action as an activity is always acting in organized groups: the progressive, gradual, and reversible.
1) Progressive Organization: The community is organized progressively; the dynamics of behavior are not changed quickly, and the social worker should keep in mind the complexity of a process in which the population recognizes itself in another way.
2) Gradual Change: The change that the community can experience is not only progressive but also gradual. It does not affect all participants, and therefore we can draw two basic conclusions: Do not make comparisons between individuals and organizations, respecting the evolution of each of them, and analyze the characteristics of the population to act on those traits that can accelerate the change process.
3) Managing Change: Finally, the caseworker must be prepared to manage the phases in which change processes are slowed or deteriorate, in which communities can become paralyzed by disputes over power, the definition of the objectives, or simply because of personal disagreements, excessive prominence, or conflicts of interest.
Continuous and Final Evaluation: Achievement of Goals and Increased Relational Density
From a perspective aimed at strengthening the capacity of the community by strengthening its ties and collective mobilization to address structural challenges, the evaluation is always a final moment in which we objectify the results achieved.
At this stage, evaluation (e.g., participatory diagnosis of what has happened) has several stages, which are repeated in the continuous assessment and final assessment: interviews with members of the community, most relevant social actors, leaders’ opinions, those responsible for political parties and organizations, to perceive in each phase of the project how they are meeting their objectives and how the change process is perceived. Also, we must take into account the assessment that the community itself establishes, both at intermediate stages of the project and at the final evaluation session.
In the evaluation process, three key objectives should be taken into account: