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Session Title: Community Organizing Evaluation: Crossing the Next Frontier
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Panel Session 522 to be held in Mineral Hall Section C on Friday, Nov 7, 9:15 AM to 10:45 AM
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Sponsored by the Advocacy and Policy Change TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Astrid Hendricks Smith,
The California Endowment,
ahendricks@calendow.org
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| Abstract:
Community organizing is an area of advocacy work where there is considerable demand for more evaluation information and where there are new attempts to fill that void. This session is designed to provide the audience with an overview of numerous community organizing evaluation resources in existence, key themes in those resources, related tools that are available to the public and new models being tested. Case examples of recent evaluations done of community organizing work, as well as efforts to build organizations' capacities to do that work, will be presented and will bring several theories and models to life. The panel will explore the effectiveness of the tools and models used in the examples and the unresolved challenges faced. A group discussion with the audience will follow.
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Resources and Themes for Community Organizing Evaluation
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| Susan Hoechstetter,
Alliance for Justice,
shoech@afj.org
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There are a variety of different theories used and approaches taken by community organizing groups, evaluators, and funders in order to evaluate community organizing work. In an effort to identify resources for this work in a centrally available location, Alliance for Justice spent six months compiling electronic and hard copy evaluation models for an electronic compendium available to all. A review of resources demonstrated that some groups focus most heavily on empowering the community, others on achieving policy change, and yet others have a focus that combines these two areas and/or incorporate others. This presentation will provide an overview of the resources for informational purposes and will, at the same time, provide a basis for critiquing the evaluation examples in the ensuing presentations.
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Evaluating Local and Statewide Community Organizing Efforts - What Does It Look Like?
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| Justin Louie,
Blueprint Research and Design Inc,
justin@blueprint.com
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Moving beyond the theory, what does evaluation of community organizing look like on the ground? How do you engage organizers in developing their theories of change? What do you measure in community organizing and how do you measure it? How do you build organizers' own capacity to do evaluation? How do you feed back evaluation information to help improve organizing? We will present examples and lessons learned from our work with community organizers across the country, evaluating issues ranging from education reform to healthcare access to smart growth. We will discuss the local, regional, and statewide organizing efforts of individual organizing groups and organizing collaboratives, and provide real-world guidance to evaluators engaging or interested in evaluating community organizing.
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Developing an Approach to Evaluating Community Engagement Advocacy Efforts
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| Jane Reisman,
Organizational Research Services,
jreisman@organizationalresearch.com
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| Sarah Stachowiak,
Organizational Research Services,
sstachowiak@orginaizationalresearch.com
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| Kendall Guthrie,
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
kendall.guthrie@gatesfoundation.org
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds three community organizations to support a community engagement strategy in concert with high school redesign efforts in Austin, Texas. A key part of the learning for the Gates Foundation, as well as the Austin community partners and school district, has been an effort to develop theory of change models for each partner and for the effort overall based on the Foundation's comprehensive community engagement framework. Organizational Research Services (ORS) has been serving as an evaluation consultant to facilitate the theory of change development and build the capacity for designing tools, and collecting, analyzing and using data to evaluate the shorter-term advocacy changes identified in their models. This presentation will share the overall community engagement model and use the Austin experience as a case illustration to share models and tools and reflect on how this process has been working.
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