Department of Education's Place-Based Strategy

Reposted from the "Stabilize" blog of the NeighborWorks America Stable Communities program.
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This progress report, "Impact in Place: A Progress Report on the Department of Education's Place-Based Strategy," presents outcomes to date on efforts at a case study of San Francisco on efforts by the Department of Education to strengthen the role of schools in their communities. According to the report, "Communities that face underperforming schools, rundown housing, neighborhood violence, and poor health know that these are interconnected challenges and that they perpetuate each other....In the education world, the focus on place is particularly important, as it gives the Department a mechanism to see how its investments focused on 'in-school' levers of change interact with 'out of school' conditions for learning and the interventions meant to address them."

Elements of the theory of action include:

• Engage the Community Through Asset Mapping and a Needs Assessment
• Focus on Clear Results and Develop Shared Data Tools
• Integrate Programs From Cradle to Career
• Build Core Capacities Within Organizations and Communities
• Break Down Silos
• Capture and Share Learning

San Francisco put these elements into action to refocus citywide strategies into place-based ones, using a report from its Human Services Agency that indicated that many families accessed multiple services: mental health, juvenile justice, and foster care. It retargeted some of the $100 million flowing into two zip code areas to focus on 2,600 families with 5,800 children.

The Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation (i3) program supports the development and expansion of innovative practices that can serve as models for improving student and school outcomes. The program also identifies and documents best practices that can be shared and taken to scale based on demonstrated success. As part of the Obama Administration's Open Data Initiative, a large focus of the place-based focus has been on improving data reporting and use for effective programming.

Have any of these efforts trickled down to the places you work?

Evaluation in Action: Demonstrating Results, Measuring Impact and Informing Change in Financial Capability

By Deborah Visser and Daria Sheehan, Guest Contributors

Deborah Visser is director for Success Measures, investments and partnerships at NeighborWorks America and Daria Sheehan is senior program officer at the Citi Foundation. This post is also available on CFED's Inclusive Economy blog.

The financial capability field is always looking for better, more rigorous ways to demonstrate results of financial coaching, financial education, housing, credit counseling and asset-building efforts on the lives of individuals and families. To address this need, the Citi Foundation joined a small group of funders and practitioners to collaborate with the Success Measures program (www.successmeasures.org) at NeighborWorks America to develop and field test a comprehensive set of financial capability outcome indicators and data collection instruments.

We are excited by the prospect that these new tools will make it easier for practitioners to measure changes in low- and moderate-income consumers’ financial status, attitudes, behaviors, resilience and more. To encourage the financial capability sector to embed outcome measurement as a standard practice, The Success Measures Financial Capability Indicators and Tools are now available to the field free of charge.

What makes these tools distinct from other traditional measures that gauge the effectiveness of financial capability efforts is the inclusion of behavioral tools that address concrete things people do, as well as the strategies they employ to manage financial change over time. Data collected from The Success Measures Financial Capability Indicators and Tools can be tailored by community-based organizations to conduct structured conversations with clients on financial issues, inform changes in program design, and communicate results to a wide range of stakeholders. Financial capability funders, researchers and policymakers can analyze client data across multiple organizations working toward the same outcomes with the same set of shared, tested metrics to identify best practice, improve their understanding of factors that impact financial stability and promote innovation through public policy reform.

This collaborative field-building effort has already gained considerable traction. For example, the Youth Financial Empowerment (YFE) program in New York City has used the new tools to determine attitudes and behaviors regarding financial practices of youth in its program and is continuing to track changes over time. This will enable YFE to better help its clients cultivate a mindset about saving money that would support the transition from foster care to independence. In Oakland, the East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation has been able to make use of the tools to help its clients begin to learn how to reduce their debt, while also beginning to accumulate savings.

To sustain the momentum of these and similar efforts, a two-year, $5 million grant from the Citi Foundation is supporting a scaling initiative aimed at delivering state-of-the-art financial education and coaching needed to enable families to build their savings, reduce debt and better manage their finances. As an important component of the initiative, 31 organizations are receiving training and technical assistance to use the Success Measures Financial Capability tools to conduct real-time evaluations of how the financial knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of their clients change over time.

We welcome your feedback on these new financial capability outcome evaluation tools and look forward to learning how practitioners are using them in their asset-building work. Check out the tools in the Citi-funded publication here: www.successmeasures.org/fctools.html.