• community support for resources
• corporate and business donations
• school districts contributions in kind from community
• Home and School organizations
• Northern Alberta Reading Specialists' Council
• publishers' donations
• Alberta government grant for STEP student
• Clifford E. Lee Foundation grant
• research grant from Alberta Advisory Committee for Educational Studies via University of Alberta
• community development projects
• Chamber of Commerce
• sharing costs between stakeholders

Canada

In addition to the funding sources already listed for Alberta, other programs in Canada reported the following:

• provincial departments of education
• separate school boards
• Laubach Literacy of Canada
• literacy foundation
• private donations
• volunteer instruction by day-time instructors Native book fairs to raise money for Native family reading resources (Jimmy Sandy Memorial School, Kawawachikamach, PQ)

D. Developing Evaluation Processes

Family literacy practice is largely uncharted territory, and there will be false starts and misleading data. However, without comprehensive data, we will not know whether this is truly a new and significant step in literacy services, or just another complicated educational fad. The danger is that policy decisions will be made prematurely based on poor evaluation information; especially a concern when expectations for success are so high. A second danger is that, in a quest for data. programmes distort their services or frighten away the very participants for whom services are developed. (Nickse 1993, 40)

Evaluation is the answer to the question, "Do literacy programs work?" There is a growing emphasis on accountability and results; in family literacy and literacy in general we need to address the need for comprehensive, carefully designed evaluation processes.

Evaluation Issues

Scarcity of Evaluative Information

There is general agreement on the scarcity of "hard" evaluative data on the effectiveness of family literacy programming. The most obvious reason for this is that family literacy is a relatively new field, lacking the research and development that underlies evaluation in other areas. Another related factor is that evaluative "tools" specific to family literacy are just being developed; assessing family interactions and the multiple effects of programming on adults and children have challenged the existing range of evaluation methods (Weiss and Jacobs in Nickse 1990a, 46).

"Family literacy" includes such a broad range of program types that this also poses a challenge to developing evaluation strategies. Areas to evaluate and appropriate methods will depend on the goals of each program. From a broader perspective, this range of programming makes it difficult to compare data. As a result, the lack of a coherent, theoretical background makes it difficult to develop "good practice" guidelines for family literacy evaluation.