Increasingly, public health practice is turning to the application of community collaborative models to improve population health status. Despite the growth of these activities, however, evaluations of the national demonstrations have indicated that community health partnerships fail to achieve measurable results and struggle to maintain integrity required for sustaining efforts. Whereas community partnerships are difficult to evaluate, traditional evaluation methods may not be addressing outcomes most relevant to ways partnerships work and may fail to provide information needed by different partners to make decisions about their continued involvement. This article presents the results of a qualitative case study designed to identify indicators of success for a specific community partnership and to test the feasibility of an evaluation tool more suitable for collaborative efforts. Using principles of social capital, the research demonstrates that through the discovery and communication of what is valued by participating collaborative members, evaluations can both address internal information needs for sustainability and produce assessments of effects on health outcomes. The "value" indicators generated by the evaluation tool are presented, as is a description of the process by which they were negotiated. Feedback from the pilot-test participants on the feasibility and value of the process is also presented. By discovering outcome measures that suit both participants and policy makers, community partnerships may move toward greater accountability and hence sustainability. (Contains 5 tables.)