Measuring community development in Northern Ireland: a handbook for practitioners

This handbook was made to support the government Strategy for the Support of the Voluntary Sector and for Community Development in Northern Ireland. It is designed for measuring progress in policies, programmes and projects intended to encourage community development (CD). It does so by setting out the main results to be expected from CD work and showing how these can be measured. It is based on, and accompanies the report æMonitoring and Evaluation of CD in Northern IrelandÆ which describes the process in more detail and should be used in conjunction with this handbook. The aim of the approach is that all involved (funders, implementers and consumers) have an equal say in deciding what should be expected and how results could be checked. The first part of the handbook focuses on evaluation in the context of CD, presents ten æbuilding blocksÆ in CD (community learning, justice, organisation and activity, influence, economy, care, environment and nature, safety, well-being and sustainability) and gives a step-by-step description of how to set up an evaluation of CD. The second part is a guide to selecting the information which can be used to measure change in the different CD building blocks, using tables presented at the end of the document. The third part of the handbook gives a general overview of how to collect evidence supporting the measurement process. This is followed by tables describing the building blocks and their measurement. Each of the building blocks has a corresponding table with questions measuring change in people, in the community, in local services and in policies in relation to that specific aspect of CD.