:: The Cricket Island Foundation ::

Our Grantmaking

Capacity Building Initiative

As a result of a strategic needs assessment of our grantees, in January 2006 the Foundation launched a sixteen-month Capacity Building Initiative for programs involved in youth-led social change. The Initiative's goal was to encourage reflection, evaluation, and development among youth and staff in the fourteen participating organizations in Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, and New York.

This goal was identified for three reasons:

The Foundation found that the evaluation schemes imposed on programs by funders rarely capture information that is effective in helping programs make real operational improvements. With limited capacity, resources that nonprofits allocate to funder-driven, highly quantitative evaluation are not available for the kind of evaluation that serves internal needs and helps programs work more effectively.
In spite of their interest, few organizations have the resources to involve youth participants in evaluating program effectiveness and impact, and in articulating this internally and externally.
The Foundation believes that the leadership development of participants cannot happen in a vacuum; there must be an organizational culture that promotes learning, curiosity, and personal development across youth and staff.

Working with consultants Kim Sabo Flores, PhD. and P. Catlin Fullwood, the Foundation identified Participatory Evaluation Research (PER) as the strategy we would use to develop this culture of inquiry. PER is a process that allows an organization to involve all of its stakeholders in identifying questions that they would like explore, and gives them the tools to answer those questions.

When focused on internal evaluation, PER has been used by these organizations to engage youth in identifying the ways in which they have developed through program participation, and it has given them the skills to evaluate that development. Youth participants have also used it to assess how successful their organizing campaigns or community projects have been. It is our hope that such youth inclusion in evaluation will increase their investment in the organization, its campaigns and their own personal development, and will lead to greater organizational responsiveness towards the youth participants.

When used as a research tool, PER has helped youth participants to come to a greater understanding of the complexity of the problems they are addressin–whether school reform, teen dating violence, or another issue–and has informed the strategy they then use to address those problems.

The fourteen organizations received on-site support from the consultants and met frequently with their city-specific cohort for further training and peer support. The Initiative concluded with a convening in June 2007, in Chicago, where youth and staff from the programs met their peers from other cities, shared successes and challenges, presented the results of their projects, and discussed strategies for sustaining PER in their organizations.

The participating programs are:

The foundation has begun following up with participating programs to gain a better understanding of the initiative’s impact, and how that impact could be sustained over time, as well as transferred to other organizations that were not a part of the initiative.