Evaluation Blues

The families living in the Vintage Park apartments in King County, Wash. live without enough food and clothing. Many speak only P'urhepecha, the language of an indigenous community in Michoacan, Mexico. Isolated, overworked, and poor, these families are not sure how to help their children get a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Stanford social innovation review 2008-01, Vol.6 (1), p.23
Main Authors: Silverstein, Laura, Maher, Erin J
Format: Magazinearticle
Language:English
Subjects:
After school programs
Case studies
Community development
Nonprofit organizations
Quality control
Regulation
Test methods
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The families living in the Vintage Park apartments in King County, Wash. live without enough food and clothing. Many speak only P'urhepecha, the language of an indigenous community in Michoacan, Mexico. Isolated, overworked, and poor, these families are not sure how to help their children get ahead in the United States. Our organization, Burien, Wash.-based New Futures, tries to help them by offering afterschool programs, assistance in meeting basic needs, and community building activities. Although quantifying the outcomes of flexible, innovative, and holistic programs like ours is difficult, we have tracked our progress for a decade. But now we face mounting pressure to prove, with scientific precision, that our programs positively affect the lives of children and families. Nationwide, a movement to allocate public funds only to evidence based programs is currentiy under way. And so we decided to use scientific methods to prove that our programs work. We didn't have the funding or staff time to undertake a large-scale experimental impact evaluation, but we could manage a small-scale project. We already had a team of directors and frontline staff that met monthly to work on evaluation. With this team in place, we could conduct a more scientific evaluation. But even with more resources and support than most small nonprofits have, and with promising preliminary results, our evaluation couldn't tell us what we wanted to find out. We came to question the wisdom of policymakers who require that nonprofits scientifically prove their impact.
ISSN:1542-7099