Evaluating Programs Within Your Agency You may have had an opportunity to develop a new program or assist with the implementation of an existing program at your practicum site. Either way, program evaluation is essential to meeting the needs of community members. Many well-intentioned programs fail to meet their objectives. We have already discussed assessment of community needs and assets in Module 4. Such assessment is also the first step in program evaluation. There are three other steps (Rossi, Lipsey & Freeman, 2004): Assessing your program theory, assessing implementation, and assessing impact. Next you need to evaluate how well the program is being implemented. If your program is unsuccessful, the problem may not lie in its theory - it may lie in a broken link in the implementation chain. These links include identifying and recruiting clients, staff training, monitoring of fidelity to training, caseload size that is manageable, linkage to outside resources, coordination with stakeholders, and proper incentives and accountability for clients. Once you assure that the program is being implemented well, you need to know to what degree the short-term and long-term outcomes the program is trying to accomplish are being met. What changes are occurring, and how do we know they are the result of the program versus other variables