Program Evaluation: An NGO's Attempt to use Volunteerism to Promote Community Development

• Main Author: Mael, Adrienne Sage
• Format: Others
• Published: Scholar Commons 2012
• Subjects: community building; development; empowerment; neoliberalism; volunteer; American Studies; Arts and Humanities; Other Social and Behavioral Sciences
• Online Access: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4138; http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5334&context=etd

This thesis provides an ethnographic account of a NGOs effort to recruit and retain volunteers. Specifically, this project is a program evaluation of a community-based grant designed as a bottom-up approach to empower community residents to make changes in their community. The study details the many efforts - and obstacles - involved in this process. It is presented as a contribution to the anthropology of policy, to evaluation theory, and to applied anthropological methods. The investigator used participant-observation fieldwork and ethnographic interviews of both volunteer and non-volunteers to evaluate the program's successes and failures.