Adapting the Empowerment Evaluation Model: A Mental Health Drop-in Center Case Example

Empowerment evaluation involves a program’s stakeholders in designing and implementing an evaluation of their own program, thus contributing to the program’s improvement and self-determination (Fetterman, 1994, 1996). It appeared to be an appropriate approach for evaluating a mental health drop-in center, which had congruent goals of collaboration and self-sufficiency. However, encouraging ongoing participation among the stakeholders was challenging. The evaluation process was adapted, with the evaluator designing and conducting most of the evaluation but incorporating substantial input from the stakeholders throughout the process. This involved careful attention to the evaluator’s roles, and decisions concerning the depths of stakeholder versus evaluator participation at each step of the evaluation. Adaptations to empowerment evaluation must consider the values of the program, as well as balance the stakeholders’ needs for resources with their rights for autonomy. “Evaluation must either change and adapt as the environment changes, or—as a result of its unresponsiveness and irrelevance—follow the path of the dinosaurs to extinction” (Fetterman, 1996, p. 25). Fetterman’s remark was in reference to a controversial new model of evaluation he advocates, empowerment evaluation. Empowerment evaluation aims to promote the self-sufficiency of its stakeholders via active involvement in evaluating their own program (Fetterman, 1996). This paper offers a case example of an empowerment evaluation of a mental health drop-in center, which demonstrates that the conceptualization of empowerment evaluation This manuscript was based on the author’s doctoral dissertation for the Educational Psychology Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Using empowerment evaluation to evaluate a consumer-operated drop-in center: A narrative