|
|
Working yourself out of business is not working Wednesday, January, 27, 2010
Great Non-Profits Deserve A Great Rating System Wednesday, December, 16, 2009
Missing the Mark: Why Business-Mindedness Cannot Solve the Problems of the Non-Profit Sector Tuesday, December, 8, 2009
Too Many Non-Profits? Tuesday, December, 1, 2009
The Poverty Business Tuesday, November, 17, 2009
Poor By Design Monday, November, 16, 2009
The Poverty Landscape Wednesday, November, 11, 2009
We Need Inforum Thursday, November, 5, 2009
Effective Social Investing Wednesday, November, 4, 2009
Social Services Cause Homelessness
Thursday, November, 5, 2009
Effective Social Investing
The Alliance for Effective Social Investing is an ambitious effort to develop a framework for evaluating the social value of non-profit organizations across agencies and programs. I was cautiously optimistic about the Alliance for Effective Social Investing when I first wrote about it a year ago, back when they initially formed. I was prompted to check-up on what the group has done in the last year after hearing an interview earlier this week with the group's chairman, Jeff Mason, on the Chronicle of Philanthropy's Philanthropy this Week podcast (episode number 16, you can download the mp3 here).
Over the last year the Alliance has produced some working papers outlining an approach, largely developed by two of their members, on how to judge the social value and effectiveness of non-profit organizations. Their method, described in a paper titled the Guide to Effective Social Investing is largely underwhelming.
Outcomes evaluations are tremendously complex. Coming up with one metric to compare the effectiveness of a homeless shelter and a mentoring program seems nearly impossible. My hope was that this group would somehow tackle this critical issue, developing a central currency of social value we could use to evaluate unlike organizations across sub-sectors.
In hindsight, my hope, and their mission, is unrealistic. Instead of attacking this problem with the statistical and analytical rigor it would need, the Alliance opted to instead publish a framework reliant on evaluative vagaries that at best offer guidance for producing subjective analysis. Their system is predicated on subjectively determining how much, or how little, an organization utilizes things like "program impact data" and inhabit concepts like "capacity to deliver services/programs with fidelity"
We are an industry full of buzz words. "Organizational capacity", "outcomes oriented", "tested and effective", we don't need more terminology and concepts. What we need to do is rigorously, and analytically, evaluate what is working and what is not.
Perhaps the idea of establishing one evaluation criterion that fits all agencies is too quixotic. A better approach is to not center evaluations on agencies at all. Instead, evaluations should be focused on clients. If my program is meant to reduce a family's poverty status through job placement, then my program should be judged by how much variation in client incomes is the result of my job placement services. Using this outcome metric, one can then compare my program to any other program designed to impact a client's poverty status.
I still have hope for the Alliance for Effective Social Investing. If we are to become an industry that takes evaluations seriously, we need a central voice. The Alliance can be that voice. However, before they do, they need to start singing a different tune.
(Photo by Business Pictures)
Please fill in the form below.
A Third Wave Of Addressing Homelesness Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Civil Overestimation Friday, April 3, 2009
WWYD? Monday, November 13, 2006
705 Missing Homeless People: Where Did They Go? Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Body Found In A River Near Long Beach
Linda Rosenberg, MSW Juan was a delivery driver, but his health problems were putting him at risk of losing his job. His diabetes was poorly controlled and had caused foot ulcers that made it difficult for him to walk. He also had bipolar disorder, which was not being controlled. When he joined the Working Well program in Harris County, Texas, Juan worked with a case manager to get orthopedic shoes, to receive support in developing a diabetic diet and exercise plan, and to make an appointment with a psychiatrist to bring his mental health condition under control. As a result, Juan was able to continue working full time as a delivery driver and received a raise for exceptional performance (Bohman, Stoner, & Chimera, 2009). Working Well is part of the....
Homelessness Resource Center "I believe that people who are trained in Motivational Interviewing have a different perspective on building relationships. Many people are trained to view clients in a paternalistic manner, like they are children. This attitude says that providers always know what is best for a client. This attitude makes us think that we must convince clients that we know what is best for them. In this view, success is measured by the provider’s actions, not the client’s." In the spirit of Motivational Interviewing, Alan Pickett, a Mental Health Outreach Nurse at the Project Outreach Team (PORT) for Washtenaw County Community Mental Health in Ann Arbor, Michigan, does not define success this way. He believes his first task to is to make himse
David J. Jefferson “The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” When William James, ostensible father of American Psychology, penned this line over a century ago, he had embedded the idea in a discussion on religious experience, in which he also extolled the virtues of voluntary poverty. Today, in a totally distinct context, James’ words are imbued with new meaning. Due to economic recession and what many economists have deemed a jobless recovery in contemporary America, people who never before feared poverty—the educated, or middle class—must now confront harsh new realities. The current conditions are like nothing we’ve ever seen. Conspiring myriad circumstances....
Jamie Van Leeuwen When Denver’s Road Home began over four years ago, we never could have anticipated a year like we just had. Who could ever imagine that our economy would shift into a global recession unlike anything the country has experienced since the Great Depression? And yet, in the midst of unparalleled economic shifts, there comes great opportunity. We believe there has never been a more important time for Denver to have a plan to end homelessness. During the past year, our homeless plan has been tested and we expect the coming year will continue to pose new challenges for us. Housing foreclosures, unemployment and funding cutbacks will continue to place new demands on our ten-year plan to end homelessness. As a result, we updated our plan so....
Linda Valverde & General Dogon The authors have lived and worked in Central City East—commonly known as Skid Row—for a combined thirty years. During all of our decades of living in Los Angeles, neither of us had ever heard of gentrification until about five years ago, when we became members of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN). Now it seems that gentrification has become a common household word in cities throughout the United States, and nowhere more than downtown Los Angeles. When redevelopment really took off in downtown L.A. in 2002, LA CAN and our allies created five principles for fair redevelopment. We wanted to see our neighborhood revitalized, not gentrified. The principles were....
Inforum RSS Feed