The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 1997 signaled a major increase in time, energy, creativity, and money devoted to enrolling eligible children in health insurance programs. Child advocates and others have focused on developing outreach and enrollment strategies to bring the benefits of these new SCHIP programs to children and their families. Noting that knowing whether these strategies are working is as urgent as the strategies themselves, this issue brief discusses the role of participatory evaluation in keeping a clear focus on the purpose of the project and its learning objects in order to develop a program which can be evaluated for effectiveness, not only at the project's completion, but while the project is underway. Every project component--planning the activities, identifying the participants, developing the training, deciding on the data to be collected, and designing the tracking forms--needs to be measured against these questions: Why are we doing this project? and What do we want to know when the project is over? An interview with Pat Redmond, the health director at the Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth, is presented to illustrate how participatory evaluation leads to a project that can be evaluated for effectiveness. (KB)