Evaluation Capacity Building at the Speed of Community

The Ford Family Foundation’s Rural Community Building (RCB) team supports scores of place-based community building initiatives, offering a combination of expert advice and coaching, connections with other community builders, and financial support. RCB is committed to “moving at the speed of community,” adjusting the focus and pace of local efforts to meet the capacity and interest of residents. This responsiveness can make traditional evaluation approaches challenging to implement, since measurement and assessment are sometimes perceived as antithetical to those trusting relationships.

Concurrently, the foundation’s Board of Directors has sought clearer metrics from all grantmaking programs, including the RCB. Ford Family worked with Public Profit to build the capacity of RCB’s staff and grantees to collect information that would both meet the Board’s needs for more data and support continual improvement among community building initiatives.

Corey will share three key moments from the evaluation capacity building engagement, and what evaluators in similar settings can learn:
> Developing a facilitation toolkit for rural community builders to use to assess their own progress in settings where structured assessments are rarely used.
> Supporting the refinement of quantitative metrics for the RCB team that balanced complexity and specificity.
> Adapting the project scope and cadence to be flexible and adaptive, but clear.