New Approaches to Evaluating Community Initiatives. Concepts, Methods, and Contexts. Roundtable on Comperhensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families.

The Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives for Children and Families is a forum in which persons involved in the current generation of community-based cross-systems can engage in discussion about their work. Roundtable members, now numbering 30, meet biannually to share lessons they are learning and to work on common problems they face. The Roundtable has created a Steering Committee on Evaluation to develop new approaches to program evaluation. As a first step in its work, the Committee commissioned papers to serve as the launch point for a session in August 1994 that resulted in the Committee's detailed work plan. The commissioned papers presented here are: (1) "Introduction" (Anne C. Kubisch, Carol H. Weiss, Lisbeth B. Schorr, and James P. Connell); (2) "Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives: A View from History" (Alice O'Connor); (3) "Nothing as Practical as Good Theory: Exploring Theory-based Evaluation for Comprehensive Community Initiatives" (Carol Hirschon Weiss); (4) "How Do Urban Communities Affect Youth? Using Social Science Research To Inform the Design and Evaluation of Comprehensive Community Initiatives" (James P. Connell, J. Lawrence Aber, and Gary Walker); (5) "Problems in the Evaluation of Community-Wide Initiatives" (Robinson G. Hollister and Jennifer Hill); (6) "Using Community-Level Indicators of Children's Well-Being in Comprehensive Community Initiatives" (Claudia J. Coulton); and (7) "The Role of the Evaluator in Comprehensive Community Initiatives" (Prudence Brown). (SLD) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ***********************************************************************