Evaluation of Night Ministry - Report Example

EVALUATION OF NIGHT MINISTRY Introduction Monitoring and evaluation is one of the most important components in the project cycle. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is important in community development project as it helps to assess if there is any progress being made in line with the expectations of the program (Greenwood and Levin, 2007, p. 129). Monitoring involves an ongoing process of collection and analysis of data which informs stakeholders of the progress being made towards achieving the goals of the project (Rossi et al., 1999, p. 132; Vanderplaat, 1999, p. 84). On the other hand, evaluation is the comprehensive appraisal which looks into the overall impact of the process and it also gives important details of how future projects should be implemented. M&E is important as it improves management of the project. Monitoring helps project managers to put in place mitigating factors that cushion the project against drift of strategies. According to Cousins and Whitmore (1998, p. 17) evaluation helps to measure the long-term impact of the project. This paper will review the evaluation report on Night Ministry. It will look into what, why, and how of the research and also look into implications for self-determination and resistance through a critical discussion on ethics, micro political context, and societal context. Background of Nigh Ministry The Nigh Ministry was founded in 1976. It is a nondenominational church-based organization which provides physical, emotional, and spiritual services in Chicago’s street nighttime communities. Nigh Ministry has been serving male and female prostitutes, homeless people, chronically mentally ill patients, sexual minorities’ disenfranchised individuals, substance abusers, and many others. Night Ministry has been working from locations like bars, bathhouses, parks, and others. It reaches out to marginalized individuals in the society using three main efforts. First, through a street and health outreach programs, second through an emergency shelter with 16 bed capacity catering for both youths and children, and third through a city-wide partnership for different organizations providing emergency shelter to youths. Evaluation activities carried out by Robin Lin Miller mainly focused on Outreach Health Ministry (OHM) which is the main program for street and health outreach. Under this program ministers have established different communities throughout Chicago area. Ministers offer companionship, support, counseling and other referral services to parishioners. This program has a bus which offers services like hospitality, condoms, clothing, health care, screening STDs, counseling, and companionships. The bus is staffed by nurses and volunteers traveling between three parishes every night following a very close schedule. OHM is based on the main idea that promotion of personal and spiritual growth will finally lead to an improved quality of life. The principles of the program are therefore aimed at improving psychological, spiritual, physical, and other important qualities of life. This is achieved through development of relationships with nighttime community members cultivating respect and dignity to give people the sense of being valued and supported. These relationships are built over a long period of time and in some instance it may take years. OHM empowers participants through encouraging personal transformation. The program also maintains reflexive nature of relationships between community members, staff, and working volunteers. Night Ministry and its related program have been described as a radical vision ministry. The program puts faith into action in a very nonjudgmental way encouraging Christianity by going to the people, tailoring ministry, and changing role of ministers to a learner. It is a unique outreach program that articulates Christianity elements in a special way. What, why and how of the report What was evaluated in the project? The main objectives of the evaluation process were to improve the evaluation process of the Night Outreach Health Ministry and the evaluation skills of its staff. The main target was therefore the evaluation process and the skills of the staffs. This can be described as an empowerment evaluation since it targeted empowerment of the evaluation process to help it meet its laid down objectives. Unlike other evaluations that deals with the activities of the program in view of the targeted beneficiaries, this evaluation looked at the internal evaluation process in the health program and how the program staff were well equipped to carry out the evaluation process. According to Fetterman (2001, p. 54) empowerment evaluation is defined as the use of evaluation concepts, techniques, and findings in order to foster improvement and self-determination. The main goal of such evaluation is to improve on the success of the program (Joint Committee on Standards for Educational Evaluation, 1994, p. 22). Why was the program evaluated? The evaluation of Nigh Ministry was initiated by a response from the desire by the ministry to improve its evaluation process in the Outreach Health Ministry. The process also became necessary in order to evaluate the skills of the staff members. For a long time, the organization has been dissatisfied with the kind of data that had bee collected previously since they had a strong belief that that the data failed to communicate the identity and practices of the program in an effective way. Night Ministry is one of the community service organizations that operate programs based on their results. This means that funding a program depends on the overall impact that it has on different stakeholders most important the targeted nighttime community in Chicago. It was therefore imperative to have a strong evaluation and monitoring method that gave accurate results to assess the impact of the program and henceforth determine its viability. How was the program evaluated? In 1996, Miller, who carried out the valuation process, had attended a meeting of Board of Directors and staff in order to come up with a list of evaluation needs and the target audiences for the organization. This was necessary to chart the way forward for the organization since its continuity depended on the results from the evaluation process (Wandersman, 2004, p. 140). Later the programs set up an evaluation team that included different stakeholders. Miller led the groups and was joined in by a group of graduate students from Illinois University in Chicago, minister, nurses, and divinity student interns. The group agreed that parishioners would not be included in the term but they were integral members of the evaluation process as they had important contribution to make to the progress of the team. It is important to note that a unique feature of the valuation process was that it was mainly volunteer effort. This means that the program was not funded despite the fact that there was a foundation that offered funding for the project when it was midway. However, the team declined funding since it would slow down the projects because of timelines and accountability requirements that characterize funded projects which would hurt the initial momentum that the team had started with. Reflection Throughout this evaluation, there is clear evidence of self-determination by the evaluators to come up with an effective evaluation process that meets the expected standards. This evaluation had a lot of implications on to the programs and to the recipient of health services offered by the program (Wandersman, 2004, p. 143; Unwin 2006, p. 111). To have a clear understanding of the implication of the research, it is important to understand the factors behind its initiation and what it was supposed to achieve. The main reasons for the implementation of the evaluation program was to improve the evaluation procedures in the program through evaluating data collected and the skills of the program staffs who are likely to be participants in the study. Ethics Ethics was an important consideration in the evaluation process. Night Ministry Program operates in a very sensitive environment and adherence to ethics was an important factor to ensure success of the process (Commonwealth of Australia, 1969, p. 38; Christians 1997, p. 15). The program deals with nighttime communities who require a lot of secrecy especially in dealing with the information collected from the parishes. Ethics was one of the most important factors that were carefully considered. Ethics in the evaluation was important for a number of reasons (Fettrman, 1994, p. 95). First the evaluation process had to use data collected from program beneficiaries in order to come up with the most valid data (Wandersman, 2004, p. 145; Denzin and Lincoln, 2005, p. 25; Fluehr-Lobban 1991, p. 57). In the course of evaluation process, there were a lot of interruptions due to frequent policy sweeps on the specific areas targeted by the program. This resulted to some distrust between the beneficiaries and volunteers carrying out the evaluation process. This meant adherence to ethical principles was important to give assurance to beneficiaries that the evaluation process was for the benefit of the programs and its participants and it was not in any way related to frequent police raids. However, there were ethical issues that arose from the evaluation process. For example in one set of data collected by the participants, it showed that they had frequent contact with the women and African Americans compared to men and Caucasian or whites. However, there were inconsistent with the collected data which showed that participants had more conversation with men and Caucasians or white persons. This implied that important ethical considerations like reporting correct racial information without bias proved to be a great challenge for the evaluators. The report also showed that despite having a perception that there were frequent talks on AIDS which was one of its lifeline activities, on one HIV/AIDS risk reduction counseling had been carried out throughout the entire period of evaluation. These were among the important ethical implications that came out of the evaluation process. Micro political context According to Fettrman (1994, p. 78) any evaluation process is affected by the environment under which it takes place. This means that apart from internal factors, there are external factors which influence the evaluation process. The most prevalent external factors include social, political, and economic factors (Patton 1982, p. 68; Chelimsky 1997, p. 90). Political factors fall into the larger country political environment and the micro political environment within the program and the surrounding environment. Politics plays an important role in our life and it affects the social and economic life. Politics also affects community development projects since they operate within a politically charged environment and sometimes politicians have a lot of influence on how these programs operations (Patton 1997, p. 28; Cooke and Kothari 2001, p. 57). During the evaluation process of Night Ministry, there were micro- political factors which influence the overall completion of the process. First the organizations had to seek permission from the local leaders in order to carry out the program although it was operating within its given mandate. Considering that the programs was operation at night and some evaluation activities were outside its usual activities, it was necessary for the organizers to seek collaboration from the local leaders. Micro-political factors that influenced the evaluation process mainly emanated from the influence of the local political arrangements. For example frequent sweeps by the police during the two months period of evaluation greatly interrupted the evaluation process and influenced outcome of the process (Wandersman, 2004, p. 148). This was a result of the micro political context that was beyond the control of the programs. There were other political factors that influenced data collection process. For example as reviewed earlier, there was discrepancies in racial data collected with data showing that there were more contacts with whites than African Americans while the assumption showed contrary. However, there were no politically charged emotions that further negatively affected the evaluation process since the process was carried out in contexts of routine activities of the health care program. Policy Process Evaluation is a process that is mainly implemented in line with a laid down policy (Kemmis and McTaggart, 2000, p. 50; Bicknell and Telfair1999, p. 90). According to Maton and Salem (1995, p. 635) the policy process therefore lays the foundation for any evaluation process since it gives the guidelines on how the whole process will be carried out. The evaluation process was based on the existing weaknesses that had been identified in the evaluation process and hence the need empower the valuation to make it more relevant to the program and also to help in laying the framework for improving staff skills. The whole process was aimed at building an improvement-oriented culture and therefore this remained the guiding principle of the whole process. For a period of six months of observation and participation of program activities, the program policy aimed at achieving a change in approach to the valuation process in the program through changing the type of data collected and improving the skills of the staff members (Wandersman, 2004, p. 143). After the six months, the team came up with a logical model based on the underlying theory of OHM. This model was then discussed in details by the group upon which they agreed on the most local models that aligned with goals and strategies of the team. In laying down the policy process, the team then identified the practices which were closely associated with the logical model components. The participating staff worked tirelessly to create program templates which made it easy to apply the logical model. The implications of the policy process reassert the importance of carefully planning and considerations of the model with appropriate corresponding practices. It is therefore imperative that appropriate model need be developed to align with the program goals in order to achieve empowerment evaluation. 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