Evaluating Community Collaborations

Author: Thomas E. Backer, PhD, Editor

Collaborations, which bring organizations together in a community to implement or improve an innovative program, or change a policy or procedure, have become a central strategy for promoting community change.  Funders require them; nonprofits see them as useful solutions to their problems of declining resources and increasing complexity (including multicultural issues); and communities demand them as evidence that key stakeholders are coming together to address problems of mutual concern.

But any idea whose time has come also must be proven effective, and worth the scarce resources it uses up.  A fundamental question (which has so far been little addressed in evaluation studies of collaborations) is whether the resources used in collaboration have greater impact than if they had been used in separate actions by the participant organizations or community groups.  This question is important because there is always a "transaction cost" associated with the act of collaboration itself – not only the financial costs of operating the collaboration, but also the time and effort put into it by the participants.

Moreover, no matter how powerful the concept, the implementation of community collaborations can usually be improved.  The evaluation of collaborations can provide evidence of outcome and impact, and can help improve the process by which the collaboration operates.

This book was developed by the nonprofit Human Interaction Research Institute, with funding support from the Federal Center for Mental Health Services, in connection with a series of evaluations of mental health, youth violence prevention and arts grant making programs (supported by both the Federal government and foundations) - all of which involved collaborations as a central mechanism.  It is the first comprehensive treatment of theoretical, research and practice issues concerning the evaluation of collaborations, and includes a set of reproducible forms that can be adapted for this purpose.  Chapter authors are leaders in both evaluation and community collaboration work:

Thomas E. Backer, PhD, Human Interaction Research Institute
John Bare, PhD, John S. & James L. Knight Foundation
Stephen B. Fawcett, PhD, University of Kansas
Vincent T. Francisco, PhD, University of Kansas
Nancy G. Guerra, PhD, Human Interaction Research Institute and University of California, Riverside
Cynthia Kunz, BA, Human Interaction Research Institute
Alex J. Norman, DSW, Human Interaction Research Institute and University of California, Los Angeles 
Jerry A. Schultz, PhD, University of Kansas
Abe Wandersman, PhD, University of South Carolina
Tom Wolff, PhD, Community Partners, Inc.