Environmental Program Eval TIG Week: Pounds of Food, Loads of Impact: What Traditional Environmental Metrics Miss by Emery Webster and Taylor Anderson

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2026

Hi! We are Emery Webster and Taylor Anderson, evaluators at Public Profit. We are noticing a pattern: the most interesting impacts of environmental initiatives often go uncounted. When we focus only on the most countable outcomes, we can miss how change spreads – through relationships and small behavioral shifts that accumulate over time.

Beyond Environmental Metrics

We are working with a philanthropy that funds community organizations and schools to divert food from landfills and reduce waste from single-use foodware. The required reporting metrics are straightforward: pounds of food recovered, number of people fed, amount of plastic use prevented. These metrics matter – they provide important signals about progress – but they are only one part of the story on how change unfolds.

A richer story emerged when we talked with the grantees: the funded program was about waste reduction and the impact rippled into financial stability, education, and health. For example,

• Families receiving recovered food were saving money on groceries and redirecting those dollars toward education; and
• Schools that switched to reusable foodware noticed that students were eating more of their meals and throwing away less food, suggesting the change was shaping kids’ relationships with consumption and waste.

While community organizations are often aware of these ripple effects, outcomes like these are typically not communicated with funders because they are perceived as outside the initiative’s scope and are not usually solicited through required reporting. Even when funders are aware of these ripple effects, it is rarely captured in ways that can meaningfully inform evaluation findings and shape broader impact narratives. As a result, a great deal of learning about why an environmental initiative is working and how it influences communities remains incomplete and invisible.

Understand Impact Through People

Through engagements with philanthropies and community organizations, we keep arriving at the same insight: environmental impact is deeply entangled with the people leading change. Programs do not operate in isolation – they move through networks of people, relationships, and local context. For example,

• Fellowships for emerging leaders shape how the next generation understands their role and opportunity in the environmental movement; and
• Volunteer-led climate action projects build social cohesion and a sense of agency in communities that often feel sidelined.

Over time, these networks can change how communities respond to environmental challenges by creating new possibilities for collaboration and innovation. The environmental outcomes we eventually observe are often downstream from these relational dynamics.

Hot Tips

While you are evaluating environmental initiatives, ask at least one question about ripple effects such as:

• What are you hearing from participants or community members that does not fit neatly into your current reporting?
• If you could add one thing to your reporting that you are currently leaving out, what would it be?

Questions like this help surface information that might otherwise be dismissed as anecdotal. When patterns start appearing across different people and programs, those stories can become valuable evidence about how change is taking shape.

Rad Resources

Ripple Effect Mapping (REM) is a participatory focus group strategy designed to surface both anticipated and unanticipated outcomes. REM is especially useful when an initiative’s story is non-linear, multi-layered, and responsive to changing contexts.

Field Building for Population-Level Change by The Bridgespan Group offers a framework for coordinating across a field’s actors to drive change at scale. This framework helps explain why investing in people, relationships, and leadership is a powerful strategy worth measuring.

Expand What Counts

This Earth Week, get curious about the margins of your environmental data. When we expand what counts as an environmental outcome, we can make the case for the broader, interconnected value of this work.

The American Evaluation Association is hosting Environmental Program Evaluation TIG Week with our colleagues in the Environmental Program Evaluation Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our EPE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.