Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

New Voices At The Civic Table: Facilitating Personal And Social Change, Laura T. Pinsoneault, Linda Nguyen

The Foundation Review

· This article describes six pilot initiatives of the Alliance for Children and Families -- New Voices at the Civic Table (New Voices), a philanthropy-funded effort to challenge human service organizations to integrate civic engagement as a permanent part of their infrastructure.

· All six New Voices models included common elements: leadership training, civic education, experiential learning, participatory decision-making, networking, and reflective evaluation.

· Each also reflected one of four primary variations to civic engagement based on their community needs and demands: self-efficacy, constituent involvement, mobilizing, and organizing.

· Results demonstrate that civic engagement in human services not only produces …

The Blind Men And The Elephant: Learning A Little At A Time About Civic Engagement, Melanie Moore Kubo, Ashley Mckenna

The Foundation Review

· This article, written from the perspective of the evaluator, describes what happened in one community in which four noncollaborating funders were supporting community development programs.

· The Treeline Collaborative evolved from grassroots origins to become a leading organization in the community, serving as a one-stop shop for many programs and providing a structure for civic engagement of residents.

· A collaborative evaluation would have enabled a deeper understanding of the Treeline Collaborative, the outcomes it attained and missed, and the multiple roles it plays in the community, perhaps leading to more effective program and funding decisions.

Measuring The Impacts Of Advocacy And Community Organizing: Application Of A Methodology And Initial Findings, Lisa Ranghelli

The Foundation Review

· The increasing emphasis by funders on strategic grantmaking and measurable outcomes may be a disincentive to support policy and advocacy work, because of the perception that outcomes can be difficult to assess.

· A tool for measuring impact can reduce the barriers to funding advocacy and policy work.

· The tool draws upon the literatures on evaluating advocacy and organizing, social capital building efforts, and return on investment approaches to evaluation.

· The tool was applied in two sites, where funders found it useful to understand advocacy impacts and learn how advocacy can enhance their grantmaking goals.

A Model For Multilevel Advocacy Evaluation, Tanya Beer, Ehren D. Reed

The Foundation Review

· The Colorado Trust provided three years of general operating support to nine advocacy organizations working to increase access to health through policy change work.

· The nine grantees had a variety of goals and strategies and had different levels of organizational capacity, but were evaluated using a uniform evaluation approach.

· The evaluation was designed to build grantees’ own evaluation capacity to incorporate real-time feedback, monitor progress toward goals, and to assess growth in the overall health advocacy community in Colorado.

· Individual grantees identified short- and intermediate- term outcomes related to The Trust’s intermediate outcomes, which were in …