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| Success Measures Project: Documenting What Matters
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The Success Measures Project (SMP) is a practitioner-led initiative to develop grassroots outcome indicators for community development. Launched in 1997 by the Development Leadership Network (DLN), a national network of community development leaders, the project grew out of discussions among DLN members about the need for better documentation of the impact of their work than simple counts of housing units produced or dollars leveraged. Practitioners worried that resource availability, rather than community needs, was driving programs, and they feared that outside funders would impose standards, unless they created their own. In 1998 and 1999, hundreds of community development practitioners participated in working groups that identified the major benefits of housing, economic development, and community building initiatives and proposed indicators for measuring them. These became the basis for the Success Measures Guidebook, published in December 1999 and now on-line as well, at www.developmentleadership.net. The Guidebook contains 44 indicators and a step-by-step guide for engaging community members to use them for participatory planning and evaluation. Over the last year and a half, 28 community-based organizations (CBOs) across the country have been field testing the Success Measures indicators. In the first round of data collection, interest has been highest in indicators that measure sense of community, change in quality of housing, neighborhood security, and participation in neighborhood organizations. Working with the McAuley Institute, DLN is now increasing the capacity and reach of SMP. A new round of CBOs will be selected in Fall 2001 to receive support to adopt the SMP approach. A web-based system is being developed that will: allow sharing of data collection, analysis, and reporting tools; make data more accessible to participating organizations; and enable the creation of a national database of community development outcomes. And perhaps most importantly, CBOs are being engaged in an analysis of broader systems, with the goal of finding strategies for using SMP data to facilitate changing them. For More Information: Development Leadership Network 685 Centre St. Boston, MA 02130 617-971-9443 fax 617-971-0778 info@developmentleadership.net McAuley Institute 8300 Colesville Road, Suite 310 Silver Spring, MD 20910 301-588-8110 fax 301-588-8154 Copyright 2001 |
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