Helping Residents Preserve Assets in Tough Economic Times
While NeighborWorks Waco used Success Measures to examine community impact, many others are looking to the program for help with their asset building and preservation programs.
Over the past year, Success Measures and NeighborWorks National Homeownership Programs jointly have been working in partnership with the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) on the development of a suite of evaluation tools that can be used to examine and better understand how these services, which include financial education and foreclosure prevention programs, can generate wealth and enhance long-term economic security for families and communities.
This type of assessment is more important now than ever before. The foreclosure crisis has revealed that many families have fragile financial situations that can collapse the moment there’s a loss of income.
The asset building and preservation programs that housing nonprofits provide can help families build their financial future on stronger footing. Effective financial education and asset building programs can help prevent the incredible loss of wealth that this economic crisis has caused.
But many of these organizations currently don’t have the tools that will allow for the rigorous evaluation needed to determine where these asset building programs are being successful and where they need to change course.
There has been strong interest, on the part of practitioners and funders, in developing these kinds of measurement tools. “They tell us that they need to be able to have rigorous measures that capture the results of their efforts, and enables them to convey those results in useful and meaningful ways,” explains Jessica Anders, Success Measures Project Manager responsible for indicator and tool development. “They don’t have those outcome evaluation tools now.”
For this particular project, more than 60 leading nonprofits, researchers and practitioners worked with Success Measures and CFED to develop the “asset continuum indicator framework.” The project got a real boost recently with a $750,000 grant from Citi Foundation that will support the field-testing and implementation of the new product.
NeighborWorks America, the F.B. Heron Foundation, the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, and the Arizona Community Foundation are also supporting the development, field testing and deployment of the asset continuum tool. It is currently being tested in 17 communities and, after completion of a pilot implementation phase, will be refined and made available to the field in 2010.
“In today’s environment it is more critical than ever to understand how financial education and asset building initiatives can catalyze long term financial behavior change and improved economic outcomes,” said Brandee McHale, director of programs at the Citi Foundation. “We are pleased to be partnering with Success Measures and investing in efforts to help practitioners and funders better understand the impact their programs are generating.” |
