posted on: Tuesday, March 23, 2010

By Niki Jagpal

Catharine Crystal Foster, an independent consultant and seasoned advocate, and Justin Louie of Blueprint Research and Design, Inc., recently coauthored a good resource for funders and community organizers looking to evaluate organizing efforts. Grassroots Action and Learning for Social Change: Evaluating Community Organizing adds to the available resources for grantmakers that fund community organizing or those that would fund it if they could evaluate the work somehow.

Similarly, organizers can learn about the organic processes involved in evaluating their work to help them make a results-driven case to their current or prospective funders by using some of the information in this publication. Perhaps the most useful part of the publication for both grantmakers and organizers is the link it provides to a series of videos that were developed for grantees of the California Endowment, where organizers “discuss their experiences developing and conducting evaluations of their efforts.”

Incidentally, the California Endowment provided the financial support for this brief, and played a key role in NCRP’s recent Grantmaking for Community Impact Project report documenting the impacts of advocacy, organizing and civic engagement in L.A. County. Not only did the foundation provide funds for our report, but this grantmaker is exemplary in many ways, especially when it comes to supporting organizing and advocacy work for vulnerable communities and developing meaningful evaluation tools for such efforts.

So check out the latest addition to the community organizing ‘demystification box’ and kudos to Catharine and Justin on contributing to an important and ongoing discussion.

Niki Jagpal is research and policy director at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP).