Outcome Measurement Applied Locally

This year I started a work study position at a local nonprofit organization that wished to remain unnamed. I found this week’s readings particularly applicable as I was hired to assist with measuring the outcomes for its programs. The organization reflects the narrow scale and wide scope of Harlem’s Children Zone, the most cited example of an organization that vertically controls outcomes in the readings. In this post, I will inspect the various aspects of my organization’s operational mission and outputs to address whether it is reasonable to conclude any outcomes from the program.

The local nonprofit defines its organizational mission as serving the community by addressing the whole needs of the person. To serve this mission, the organization widened its scope to include programs that encompass food security, education, workforce preparation, and housing. Its operational mission incorporates these programs in its scope, seeking to provide comprehensive support to create self-sufficiency for all its constituents.

In scale, this organization is highly local. Its reach spans a third of Pittsburgh with no intentions of growing. It partners with a few organizations to provide for potential applicants that they cannot take in, but often receives pushback for their radical, hotel-like approach to providing for constituents. It is clear from my short time there that they actively engage with whatever community partners they can without compromising their commitment to their mission.

To measure the efficacy of their operational mission, the organization uses a widely acknowledged “self-sufficiency matrix”[1]. To focus their measurements, the organization mainly focuses on the following categories: Housing, Employment, Income, Food, Life Skills, Mental Health, and Substance Abuse. For constituents that moved from less secure stages to more secure stages in the ordinal scale, the results are considered positive. For those that moved down the security scale, they had a negative result. Those who made no changes in status have neutral (0) results. The recorded outputs for these measurements are positive for most constituents and neutral for the rest with one exception for substance abuse. These result show that their outputs support their operation mission, which is indicative of the success of its organizational mission.

The question remains: do these outputs lead to outcomes for the constituents? The organization certainly tries to care for as much of the self-sufficiency matrix as possible with its limited resources. The self-sufficiency matrix is intended to correlate with longer-term outcomes for the organization’s clients, with information confirming that the matrix has provided useful predictive modeling for the efficacy of a program[2]. To some degree, the lack of comprehensive adherence to the self-sufficiency matrix does make it hard to confirm enough vertical integration to point to definitive outcomes, but the core categories do get the most bang for the buck. The organization’s collected data has not yet been analyzed to identify the most impactful components of its program, but by the end of the year I hope to do just that.  

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[1] “Self-Sufficiency Matrix”, Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, Accessed September 25^th, 2017, http://www.mnhousing.gov/get/MHFA_010996

[2] Culhane, Dennis P.; Parker, Wayne D.; Poppe, Barbara; Gross, Kennen S., Sykes, Ezra. “Accountability, Cost-Effectiveness, and Program Performance: Progress Since 1998”, National Symposium on Homelessness Research, 2007, accessed September 25^th, 2017, .https://aspe.hhs.gov/report/toward-understanding-homelessness-2007-national-symposium-homelessness-research-accountability-cost-effectiveness-and-program-performance-progress-1998/case-study-arizona-evaluation-project