Xavier de Souza Briggs on Community Building

This article features an interview with Xavier de Souza Briggs, founder of the Art and Science of Community Problem-Solving Project at Harvard University, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Fellow in Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Briggs begins by explaining that evaluation can foster efforts to build communities, provided that personnel reflect on and articulate exactly what they take "community building" to mean. While building confidence is important, he says, evaluation can help these personnel think critically about what they are doing and avoid "boosterism", which means proceeding assuredly on less-than-secure assumptions. Change theories can assist in this process, he says, giving personnel those "conceptual footholds that are critical to a common, evidence-backed understanding of their community-building efforts". Evaluators can play a role in working through the jargon that characterises some of these models, he says, but face additional challenges when it comes to actually implementing the changes outlined.

The interview next focusses on the role that stakeholders - at both the "grassroots and the 'grasstops'" levels - play in evaluation of community building initiatives. Briggs urges, "There is an ongoing need to be clearer about who plays what role in a community-building effort. What are the unique capacities that each party involved in the initiative brings? What are their limits and learning needs? Evaluators can clarify the question of role and the coordination of roles." He suggests that funders and regulators, in addition to grassroots stakeholders, have objectives and interests that need attention. He argues that addressing areas of deep need in a community is an important strategy, but there should be opportunities for many different sectors to get involved. One way in which evaluation can support this process is by creating a "community of practice", which rejects the idea that information is shared only on a "need-to-know" basis. That is, evaluators can serve "as knowledge sources in larger networks, so that information flows to help improve practice". External accountability is the second area of emphasis for evaluation. Community and grassroots personnel, he says, have a role to play in being open to these kinds of queries/challenges, while also "maintaining the right to push back. The latter may include pointing out that classic problems in measuring and performance do exist, such as measuring the wrong thing well and imagining that everything valuable can be counted".

In conclusion, Briggs argues that "Continuing the evolution of the purely summative evaluation into a more grounded approach is critical. So is blurring the line between evaluation and management improvement or capacity building in general. This does not mean turning evaluators into mere cheerleaders for whatever those 'closest to the ground' want to do." Training those who seek to help community builders by asking tough questions, he says, is a key direction beyond the evaluation process.

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Source

The Evaluation Exchange, Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003. Published by Harvard Family Research Project.