A growing number of tools are now available to enhance the validity and social relevance of knowledge produced through the participatory spaces that program evaluation makes possible. Tools that facilitate a shared understanding of a program and its results are of this nature. However, evaluation teams are generally less equipped to support participation through the strategic processes of planning an evaluation or of redesigning a program based on evaluation results.

A community organization in rural Québec, together with various inter-sectoral partners, wanted to make it possible for families to take their destiny into their own hands and improve their quality of life, in particular, their children's quality of life.

This article presents the refl ections of two academics on their participation in a committee of the Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté, which brings together members from a variety of backgrounds, including some experiencing poverty. The authors explain how they joined the committee, the challenges encountered, and the lessons learned both personally and professionally. This brief testimony is intended to raise awareness of the importance of adopting a refl ective approach as a researcher or evaluator and the opportunity to succeed in doing so in community groups.

From the start of Projet AVEC, the Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté adopted the obligation to track the project's development. Far from the traditional methods of evaluation, principles were established and constantly revisited to ensure a rigorous evaluation process appropriate for the project involving individuals in a situation of poverty. Measurement tools were developed with those principles in mind.

Is it possible to systematically learn from an individual's experience as a leader in a coalition of groups and make use of it in a shared management situation? I wrote this account after more than nine years as coordinator and spokesperson for the Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté. When asked once about how I dealt with the complexity of the leadership function, an answer came to me in the form of a set of discernment tools on a key theme, transformative action.

A social intervention experiment was conducted to try to apply an approach developing the capacity to act, better known as empowerment, in an ecc inclusion framework with individuals who have been socio-eccally withdrawn, sometimes for a long time. The experiment involved the design, implementation, and testing of a new resource intended to support unemployed individuals carrying out a community job-creation project in working class districts in Quebec City.

For many years, numerous attempts have been made to define empowerment, to identify its processes, and to suggest translations. Recently the debate has focussed on the complexity raised by its measurement and evaluation. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the contribution of Ninacs's framework (2002) in evaluating empowerment, by presenting its application to the evaluation of a health promotion program in Haiti.

The development of Palabres sur le pouvoir d'agir—Outil d'accompagnement sur l'empowerment [Discussions on the Power to Act—A Coaching Tool for Empowerment] resulted from an approach implemented by the AIDS 3 Project with sex trade workers in West Africa. The tool has two interrelated sections that focus on both practice and theory in a highly dynamic process. It enables front-line workers to integrate the approach more easily in their work, to understand their role as coaches, and to review their own practices from an empowerment perspective.

Based on action research conducted with community kitchens in the Bois-Francs region of Quebec, the article examines how group facilitation contributed to the process of empowerment of individual members within these groups. The authors explain how the research team realized the multiple elements of the conceptual framework for community empowerment to achieve this outcome. In conclusion, the role of social facilitation as a community practice to be rediscovered is briefl y discussed.