Evaluating growth in advocacy capacity among culturally-specific organizations: A new conceptual framework

In 2010, the Northwest Health Foundation launched a new grant-making initiative with matching funding from the Convergence Partnership and six local funders. The intent of the initiative was to support communities of color in Multnomah County, Oregon, in their efforts to improve opportunities for healthy eating and active living by advancing policy and environmental change strategies. The unequal distribution of opportunities for healthy behaviors contributes to health inequities, and the Foundation intended to build the capacity of culturally-specific organizations to play a more effective role in shaping those opportunities.

The Foundation awarded $600,000 to seven organizations to advance a diverse range of community-defined strategies. The Foundation also worked with grantees to develop a collaborative evaluation framework that would allow them to measure their growth and progress, while also providing an opportunity to aggregate results. Since most grantees were new to the field of healthy eating / active living advocacy - and since policy implementation often takes longer than one grant period – we sought to capture meaningful milestones of growth that could predispose longer-term success.

The resulting framework - developed in partnership with Ann Curry-Stevens at Portland State University - was designed to measure growth in eight dimensions: capacity to advocate; shifts in social discourse and frames; shifting practices at the non-policy level; policy practice reforms; policy outcomes; community impacts; broader social impacts; and advocacy challenges. We will present the aggregate results reported by Convergence grantees, as well as the applicability of the framework to evaluating other equity-focused policy initiatives.