ORGANIZING COMMUNITIES TO MOVE TOWARDS CHANGE, continued

Step 6: Sustain the Effort. Be sure to celebrate your small victories as well as your large ones. This will help ensure that community members know progress is being made to reduce the problem and provide added visibility for the prevention efforts.

Step 7: Evaluate Success. Evaluation should not be considered something tacked on at the end, but a process that is embedded throughout the development and implementation of the project. Contact your local university or a research institute to identify an evaluator to participate in your planning efforts from an early stage. He or she can conduct an evaluation of the implementation process and provide you with feedback on how better to focus your strategy. Then, he or she can conduct an evaluation of the effectiveness of your strategy, which will provide support for continuing it, expanding it, replicating it, or changing it to make it more effective. It will be worth the investment if the evaluation permits you to demonstrate effectiveness and secure funding for the future.