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During conversations in 1999 with several FACT grantees, a consensus
emerged that organizations needed to become more adept at showing
the true impact of their work. In response, FACT initiated the
Community Organizing Evaluation Project in collaboration with
three of its grantees — Environmental Health Coalition (EHC),
Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) and Southern Echo.
Among our original goals were to elevate the importance of community
organizing in the funding community by developing a common methodology
that would provide our grantees with the skills to assess their
work and the language to describe their achievements. We also
felt this would address the funding community’s search for
more information and data on the impact of community organizing.
Four years later, we emerged with new skills and knowledge, and
a commitment to link evaluation to overall organizational development
and program planning. We found a wealth of knowledge within each
organization, and with the opportunity and skills to harness it;
the organizations had a lot to say about outcome and impact. We
also learned some very important lessons with regard to evaluation
and assessment that will guide us in our future work.
We found that including evaluation procedures in program planning
from the outset made it easier not only to measure impact, but
also to make important decisions about campaigns and overall organizational
direction and growth. Other lessons were about dedicating sufficient
time to evaluation, basing it on an organization’s needs,
and understanding whether the goal is to help the organization
improve its programs and strategies, or to help a funder understand
the impact of its grantmaking choices.
In May 2004, FACT hosted a meeting in San Francisco to discuss
the results of the project with like-minded funders, evaluators,
and the grantees involved. The participants reached some valuable
conclusions about the need to improve grantees’ capacity
to evaluate community organizing, and agreed to continue their
dialogue on these issues.
In collaboration with the Marguerite Casey Foundation, FACT has
also convened two funder meetings at national funder conferences
on program evaluation within both social change non-profits and
foundations. For more information, please contact us. |
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