Abstract
In the years 2000/2001, Hewlett-Packard (HP) gave US$5 million over 3 years in computers, digital camera equipment, technical assistance, and funds to each of three disenfranchised communities of color in the United States to assist them to bridge the digital divide. HP’s express goal was increasing its personal and business customer base while assisting the disadvantaged. The author, David Fetterman, was hired to assist with the implementation and evaluation using his Empowerment Evaluation methodology, a process that makes evaluation an integral part of program design and provides the community with tools for planning, implementing, and assessing. The intended benefit of this kind of intervention is that each community will feel ownership of the project and the process. Fetterman approached the venture as a large-scale test of his Empowerment Evaluation model.
This book, published 10 years after the project ended, purports to describe what happens when communities are given opportunities and resources. Fetterman promises to provide us with a new blueprint for change. While the broad answer to the question of what can happen when opportunities and resources are provided to distressed communities is common knowledge among academics, consultants, foundations, and even many companies who have studied or embarked on such ventures, I eagerly anticipated, first, a nuanced exposition on what did and did not work in these specific cases and, second, a report of the communities’ reflections on what happened. Because of the corporate presence of HP, I had also expected some kind of cost-benefit analysis, but none is included in this volume.
“Empowerment Evaluation” is a method whereby a community plans and implements a project with the help of expert assistants (called “critical friends”) and then assesses its own efforts. The community sets a mission statement for themselves (even if they already have a mission), because the mission statement needs to be created by the people actually doing the work. Then, using a process he calls “taking stock,” the group assesses their current status and, with the results in hand, plans for the future. Community members are facilitated to lead their own evaluation using a “culture of evidence,” rather than politics, to create a learning community, engage in cycles of action and reflection, and become reflective practitioners. The community repeatedly engages in this process during the course of the project. These steps (or similar steps) will be familiar to anyone knowledgeable about strategic planning, creating change, capacity building, or current evaluation practices, and the reader will be disappointed by the lack of evidence presented of these challenging steps.
This process, Fetterman tells us, is important. It replaces politics with a rational process. But we are given little insight into the day-to-day process. What the reader is told is disturbing: “In addition, we all had to learn whom to rely on (and whom to avoid) in the organization to get things done.” (p. 17) Does “we” refer to the critical friends (Fetterman’s team) as the context seems to suggest, or does it include the community? These communities were large (one included 18 Native American Tribes; another 25,000 people). With no details or examples, we are left to trust Fetterman’s word that the process was rational and not just another form of politics. The power dynamic was changed. What evidence is there that it was for the better? What happened to the people who were “avoided?”
Fetterman reports that one of the three project sites—the Baltimore Digital Villages—never developed a formal governance structure, and this problem plagued them throughout the project. Did the critical friends offer some technical assistance? If so, was it accepted? Ignored? Not understood? Here, in one of the few examples given, the reader has no idea what was actually going on. None of the education (capacity building) provided to the community by the critical friends is described. When the Baltimore Digital Village “uninvited” the sponsor (HP), Fetterman characterizes the act as a display of “organizational arrogance” without describing any perspectives of the community participants themselves (p. 49). It may have been arrogance, but showing rather than telling the reader would have helped us to make our own assessment of what happened.
The book suffers from an excess of metaphors, many of them not apt. Fetterman structures the book using automobile racing as a metaphor. This metaphor does not match the theoretical perspectives of process—“the more people participate in evaluating their own program, the more likely they are to buy into the findings and recommendations” (p. 31)—One of the few glimpses into the process, for example, contradicts his race metaphor: “It took time and effort to continually work on the relationships and to learn how to function effectively and efficiently” (p. 17). The racing and other metaphors do not add much, in the end, to the already limited information about these projects provided in the book.
The absence of voices from the communities studied is disquieting. Titillating suggestions raise the reader’s expectations: “[T]heir success, like that of the other Digital Villages, goes far beyond the numbers. The neglected nano-stories of personal triumph are part of the larger, overall community success story.” (p. 96) The successes are then presented as numbers and charts and brief anecdotes or single sentences. One person was trained and trained her staff. A child who was given a computer taught the family how to use the Internet. These could have been the basis of enlightening stories if they included the individual’s perspectives regarding what helped and hindered them. “Signature projects” are briefly described (starting on p. 24), but the reader has no sense of the size or scope of these projects. The clear message in every chapter is that these projects are successes. Evidence is needed.
Does the book reach its own goal of presenting a large-scale test of Fetterman’s model? Even after tantalizing the reader with brief descriptions of some of the problems faced by one of the Digital Villages, the extent to which Empowerment Evaluation was responsible for the “success” is unclear. There is also little acknowledgment of the roles played by the large amounts of money (three US$5-million grants), a previous failure in East Palo Alto Village, the merger of HP and Compaq (mentioned as a problem but never discussed), and Stanford University (other than as one of the sponsors and a source of facilitators). The book would be improved by more evidence-based analysis in support of its conclusions.