Facilitating Program Evaluation at Greater Vancouver Mental Health Service

After consulting for eighteen years in the field of multicultural health, I "retired" in 1993 to a nine-to-five job as Research Officer with Greater Vancouver Mental Health Service (GVMHS). My initial responsibility was to develop a model of program self-evaluation for use by GVMHS staff. Below, I describe how I came to understand the organization, how staff came to understand my role, what process was followed to arrive at a model of evaluation, and, finally, the nature of the model developed. The approach I have taken to this work is similar in several ways to the process of anthropological field work.