Evaluation is helpful for documenting the impacts and outcomes of your work and for communicating the work you did – an aspect of sustainability! This will help you set and achieve future goals. This section provides some background on evaluation and some helpful tips and tricks for adding evaluation to your rural community efforts to address community living needs for people with disabilities.

Reasons to evaluate

Some common reasons to evaluate are:

• To gauge understanding
• To gauge efficacy
• To understand the impact of what we are doing
• Access more resources (e.g. funding, in-kind)
• Build more partnerships
• Reach more individuals
• Improve project processes

Your definition of success

While evaluation helps determine success, the definition of success is up to you and those you work with. It is important to ask yourselves, “How will we know that we have been successful and what evidence do we need to show others that we made a difference?”