To get insight into a complex community, problem or process of change, sometimes you need to look beyond conventional research or evaluation methods. Ethnography is a powerful way to step inside the culture of an organization or community, hear ongoing feedback from multiple points of view, and understand a program's real impact. This guide describes ethnography's benefits and pitfalls, and how the method is used to document, evaluate and improve approaches to youth engagement, HIV education and neighborhood policing. Part of the publication series, Evaluation Techniques: A Series of Brief

Commissioned by the Working Group on Philanthropy for Social Justice and Peace (PSJP), Framing the Discourse, Advancing the Work, by Moukhtar Kocache, speaks to funders as an exploration of philanthropy at the nexus of social justice, peace, and arts and culture.  It presents a broad overview of the relationship between progressive social change work and the arts and explores the role of philanthropy in supporting this work.  It sets out recommendations for how philanthropy might further its engagement with work at this nexus.

Art & Soul is a project of the Orton Family Foundation. The Orton Family Foundation, in partnership with the Town of Starksboro and the Vermont Land Trust hypothesize that, by getting in touch with deeper community values and connections to place, citizens will be able to improve upon traditional approaches to planning and make better decisions about the future of their communities. With the Art & Soul Civic Engagement Project they are testing whether the use of different forms of art will catalyze articulation of the unique assets of a community, in turn impacting community decision-making. 

Breakthrough, an international human rights organization, invited Education Development Center/Center for Children and Technology to complete an evaluation of "ICED! (I Can End Deportation)," a video game that teaches young people about the effects of American immigration and detention policies. The video game presents scenarios of five different immigrant teenagers and asks players to answer questions about immigration and deportation policies. The evaluation focuses on two measures of social impact: the extent that "ICED!" increases players' knowledge about the U.S. immigration and

The San Diego Foundation has a long history of support for community cultural development. It has also actively supported the idea that investment in the purposeful growth of civic engagement can stimulate both social entrepreneurship and committed community leadership. Over the past two decades the Pomegranate Center, based in Issaquah, Washington, has become an established leader in the practice of what is now referred to as "creative placemaking," working with "communities to imagine, plan and create shared public places." It is not surprising then, when spurred by the interest of a major

This 5-page article on Action Evaluation from the Beyond Intractability website provides a knowledge base and tools regarding social conflict resolution and community reconciliation. This article assists participants, funders, and facilitators in reaching consensus about what they seek to accomplish (people's goals), why (their values and beliefs), and how (suggested account strategies). The article addresses the process in three stages: establishing the baseline, formative monitoring, and summative evaluation. Part of a series of linked "Knowledge-based Essays," this piece is one of many on

Abstract: This paper tells two stories of how evaluation helped artists know what difference they made; their narratives help make evaluation concepts accessible and show how evaluation can be doable and even enjoyable! Most community-based arts practitioners feel overwhelmed by what it might take to implement credible evaluation. They're pressed to define what is meant by "civic" or "social" impact, whose standards to apply, what evidence to look for, and what to document and track. They wonder how to gauge hard-to-measure outcomes such as shifts in attitude or understanding and whether

An online service based at the University of Kansas, this extensive site aims to promote community health and development by connecting people, ideas and resources. With over 7,000 pages presented in user-friendly language, the Community Tool Box (CTB) hopes to build capacity for those who wish to change their communities for the better. Users can approach the site in five different ways: To read about specific skills in community work, users may click on the Table of Contents to locate the 46 chapters and nearly 300 distinct CTB sections. For guidance in doing key tasks, users may click on Do

The authors cite nonprofits collaborating in an education system to introduce the concept of collective impact, defined as, "the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem."  Collective impact is unlike collaboration efforts and partnerships in that its "initiatives involve a centralized infrastructure, a dedicated staff, and a structured process that leads to a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and mutually reinforcing activities among all participants."  In short, large-scale, complex

Written for Animating Democracy's Arts and Civic Engagement Impact Initiative Working Group, this 14- page paper presents a conceptual framework (or logic model) for arts-based engagement. It offers a discussion of the components of the framework, and a list of questions to guide research explorations. It defines and gives examples of each element: programmatic initiative in terms of the core arts element and related civic/social purpose; context; implementation choices and actions; intermediate effects (individual, collective, and community capacity building); and social and/or civic impacts.