How valuable are evaluations?: The need for evaluation of community-based child and family services

The authors have, jointly and separately, evaluated twenty-five governmentfunded child and family community-based agencies and programs in Australia and New Zealand in recent years. They argue for more rigorous evaluation of these organisations as a tool for the development of the sector and as a requirement for the receipt of substantial funding from government sources. On the basis of their experience, they point to some of the inherent difficulties in evaluating community-based agencies that have no history of external evaluation. Unlike government departments, these agencies often experience the tension of short term, unstable funding which (realistically or otherwise) staff and management link to the outcome of the evaluation.