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This section takes the conclusions from this evaluation and addresses what they mean in the context of future program delivery in the NWT. The evaluation team has drawn upon its background in adult education, social service delivery, and community development in the north as well as its familiarity with the evaluation of other employment enhancement programs to reflect upon the lessons that IIP holds for future initiatives directed at the development of individuals and communities in the north.

In general terms, the findings from this evaluation point to the need for programs that support individual and community development in the north to have the following elements: 1) the integration of services, 2) closeness to the target group, 3) a multi-year time frame, and 4) the provision of a broad range of support services. Each of these will be discussed in turn below.

IIP integrates a number of services, including ABE, work placements and career counselling. The findings from this evaluation suggest that there is a need to broaden further the number of services that are delivered in a single package to individuals in northern communities. For example, the difficulties with obtaining child care allowances in a timely manner suggest that IIP could be strengthened by integrating child care allowances more tightly. In this regard, the experience with the Suicide Prevention Training Program may prove helpful. That program provided participants with child care allowances to remove the timeliness of financial support for child care as a barrier to participation. The program itself then recovered the expenditures made for child care allowances from the appropriate child care support program.

The work done in the context of this evaluation suggests other reasons as well for tight integration of service delivery. These include the following:

• there are at least fourteen programs that provide human resources-related services and each program has its own objectives, guidelines, administrative requirements, timelines, etc.²⁶ This fragmented programming is believed to be both alienating and intimidating to communities and constrains community development. In general, it is difficult for people in communities to have a full understanding of all these programs and their interaction. It is especially difficult for individuals such as NSDP instructors who may only be in a community for the term of a project;
• the range of programs available to communities makes coordination among programs very important. IIP projects refer to and draw upon other programs, especially in the areas of substance abuse treatment and counselling. In some instances, IIP projects also have linkages with justice- and family violence-related programs. This integration requires considerable commitment of time and energy on the part of IIP staff and representatives of other services agencies. The experience with some IIP committees suggests that this commitment cannot be assumed to exist;
• considerable time of field workers is devoted to communicating with regional and head offices, satisfying the particular administrative demands of the different programs. These demands detract field workers from focusing singularly on responding to the specific service needs in their communities. Rotation of program and project delivery staff in communities and shifting of organization-specific goals and cultures provide additional barriers to the effective integration of services at the community level and efficient service delivery;
• the tendency for program funding in the NWT, including the funding of some IIP projects, to be allocated based on the relative richness or poverty of other programming that is available in various communities. Allocations are sometimes made at the regional, head office, or college level, reflecting a genuine effort to bring equity to the distribution of government services. In the case of IIP, this model may have resulted in some communities not having IIP projects and thus not benefiting from IIP's unique strengths, such as its integration of classroom training and work placements, because they were receiving other services.

Taken together these observations regarding IIP support the conclusion that future programming should strive for tight service delivery integration covering a broad range of services.

IIP's design recognizes that the multi-faceted needs of participants require cooperation between project coordinators, instructors, CSSWs, CDOs, and other support services. The evaluation finding that IIP projects were generally more successful in imparting skills than in dealing with the personal issues faced by participants suggests that future employment enhancement initiatives in northern communities place more emphasis on addressing personal issues that may be the key determinants of participants= eventual success. As discussed in the preceding section, this may be accomplished through the integration of appropriate services into programs and the forging of appropriate linkages with other agencies to meet the multi-faceted needs of participants.

This additional focus on personal issues may also occur if programming is community-based, as envisioned in the Community Empowerment initiative. Community-based programming would change the nature of government services from being generated outside communities to something generated within them. This could make programming more responsive to personal and community development needs by reducing the distance between service delivery agents and clients.

IIP takes several steps along the continuum that ranges from the delivery of single-focus GNWT programs to the delivery of integrated community-based programming. Insofar as participants were more satisfied with the more community-oriented WAPs as compared to the college-based NSDPs, this suggests that the satisfaction with programming improves as one moves along that continuum.

However, there is a distinction between a program such as IIP reaching out to the community, be it a band or council or some other body, and being truly community-based. As less than one-half of the key informants were satisfied with the level of community involvement in IIP projects, it appears that the NSDPs and most of the WAPs were not genuinely community-based projects. By extension, it cannot be said that IIP was truly a community-based initiative.

Additional consultation alone would likely not be adequate to remove completely the dissatisfaction with community involvement in IIP, found during this evaluation. The dissatisfaction is likely more deeply rooted in the perception that communities lack ownership of the projects.

Closeness to the target group also affects the effectiveness of the client assessment and selection process. It is difficult for program staff who, although they might live in a community, are not necessarily from a community, to assess accurately all the aspects of persons, in the context of their family and community. This difficulty increases if there is a separation between the people who design projects and those who select participants as was the case with NSDPs, which were essentially designed centrally by the Colleges, while participant selection took place in the communities.

None of the NSDPs and only a few of the WAPs were designed specifically for an identified group of participants, as distinct from a type of participant such as hunters and trappers. This reduced the "fit" between the projects and the participants and likely contributed to the relatively high exit rates from IIP projects. It is suggested that future initiatives endeavour to tailor projects more closely to the needs of specific participant groups.

IIP did, however, adjust eligibility criteria to reflect local needs. Extending this flexibility by allowing communities to have more influence on the determination of the target group could, in the opinion of the evaluation team, enhance programs such as IIP further.

The low level of educational attainment of most IIP participants suggests the need for a long-term program commitment in order to have a significant impact on participants and communities. In this context IIP is but one step on the road to self-sufficiency for many participants.

There is a need for programs such as IIP to be positioned in a community as a stepping stone to other employment and training opportunities. The achievement of appropriate program coordination is difficult, however, if programs, such as ABE, are not available on a continuous basis in communities.

It is the view of the evaluation team that multi-year programming priorities to support community development may be more effective on the community level, rather than on a program level because there is more funding continuing on the community level as compared to individual programs. The prerequisites, of course, are that communities have access to and control over funds allocated to different programs, are able to move funds within spending envelopes, have support in terms of information and skill development, and that an appropriate accountability framework is in place.

IIP has strong financial but weak management information systems. This has implications for future programming as communities will need appropriate management information if they are to assume more responsibility for the delivery of integrated, multi-faceted community-based programs. Community-based managers will need information both to plan and manage programs and to be accountable to the providers of funding and their communities.

Management information systems only function if the projects supply the appropriate information. One of the frustrations of IIP staff is the difficulty they experience getting community-based project sponsors to provide the information outlined in the contribution agreements. The underlying cause of this difficulty may relate to a lack of ownership.

Compliance with information and accountability requirements tends to increase if project staff and sponsors can see a direct benefit, for example, by getting information back in a form that is meaningful from a project management perspective. Exit rates could be presented to projects with comparable rates for other projects in the region or for the NWT as a whole. Compliance will increase as well if payment of funding is linked to certain performance indicators that deal with reporting activities.

Related to management information issues is the question of how initiatives such as IIP should be evaluated in the future. In the opinion of the evaluation team, the framework for this evaluation would not be suitable in the context of communities having greater authority to address their own development needs. With program delivery shifting to communities in the north, there will need to be a corresponding shift to community-based monitoring and evaluation with an emphasis on measuring outcomes as they relate to goals set by communities.

No matter what level of service integration is reached within programs like IIP, there will always be a need to address the requirements for appropriate support systems to ensure the success of community-based initiatives. This evaluation found that a number of the problems that IIP experienced extend beyond individual IIP projects. Examples of some of the current weaknesses in broader support systems include: the absence of a full-time ABE training program (although there is a part-time program), the absence of full-time life skills teacher training, and a shortage of aboriginal instructors, especially in the western Arctic.

Enhanced services to support the community needs assessment process will be required as well. While the evaluation team recognizes that the GNWT has certainly made great strides toward gathering needed labour market information, it is the view of the evaluation team that further effort is required to integrate and format the available information so that it can be a useful planning tool for communities and community-based organizations. Indeed, the provision of relevant information to support community-level planning and monitoring activities and the provision of assistance to develop and implement appropriate planning and evaluation processes could be key roles of the GNWT in the context of increasing community-based programming C and community-based accountability C in the NWT.

The final part of this section addresses the implicit assumption in the design of IIP that all potential IIP participants need healing or at least personal development. The IIP handbook does not use such terms, but does state that, for example, life skills training is an integral part of all projects, as is personal and career counselling. Upon reflection, the evaluation team was struck as well by how strongly the underlying assumption that all participants need healing or personal development is evident in the evaluation framework and in the questionnaire that is a designed output of the evaluation activities. The latter includes, for example, impact definitions such as "helped me to lead a more healthy life" and "made me feel better about myself and my abilities".

The study team is well aware of the extensive needs among the target group and that, for example, the recent Annual General Meeting of the Native Women's Association passed a resolution recognizing that healing is integral to education. The study team questions, however, if it is appropriate for an initiative such as the IIP to assume implicitly that all participants need healing. Clearly, the program design should recognize the need for relevant services supporting participants' learning and work experiences. There are, however, individuals who are on social assistance mainly for economic reasons and whose dependency is related to the low level of economic development of their community. SARs programming should have the flexibility to accommodate such people without assuming that their life skills are deficient or their self esteem is lacking.

Footnotes

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The programs we identified include (in no implied order of importance) programs related to Community Justice, Building and Learning Strategy, Family Violence, Alcohol and Drug Program, Literacy programs (College and ECE- based), Building Healthy Communities, Aboriginal Headstart, Brighter Futures, Pathways, College-based ABE, ECE Training Plan, Community Wellness, and Investing in People.