Evaluating Social Exclusion and University-Community Partnerships

Recommended reading

Over the past two decades, social policy in OECD countries has undergone a profound shift. Traditional anti-poverty approaches have increasingly been complemented - and in some cases replaced - by interventions targeting social exclusion and social cohesion, often at the community level. Universities and other academic institutions have become more directly involved in the design and implementation of such interventions, giving rise to a growing number of university-community partnerships (UCPs).

In this context, the academic paper by Dr. Yuval Ofek offers a highly relevant contribution. The paper addresses a persistent challenge facing both researchers and practitioners: how to evaluate complex, community-level social exclusion interventions in ways that support learning and improvement, while also meeting managerial and accountability demands.

Learning from Practice: A Four-Year Case Study

At the heart of the paper lies a four-year action research case study evaluating a university-community partnership aimed at reducing social exclusion in Haifa and its surrounding minority villages in northern Israel. This longitudinal case illustrates how evaluators grappled with real-world constraints, adapted methods over time, and balanced the dual goals of accountability and learning.

What makes the case particularly valuable is its transparency. The paper does not present evaluation as a linear or tidy process. Instead, it shows how challenges emerged, how solutions were developed iteratively, and how evaluation itself became a driver of program improvement and institutional learning.

Ofek, Y. (2017). Evaluating social exclusion interventions in university-community partnerships. Evaluation and program planning, 60, 46-55.

Read the paper here.