Change Within Your Foundation Change in Your Relationships in the Community and Donor Engagement Reduction in Poverty in Your Community

Anticipating Your Impact

The previous sections will have helped you build your theory of change and lay out the goals of your poverty work. But how will you measure your progress? How will you document the changes you hope for? How will you know your work is having an impact? This section provides a framework to look at potential impacts in the community and within the community foundation itself, recognizing the complex nature of poverty reduction but highlighting some indicators (measures, policy changes, partnerships, internal changes etc.) that point to impact.

Why?

As you implement a new or stronger poverty focus for your community foundation, you'll want to know whether it is having any effect. Clear goals at the outset are essential. (We hope that previous sections of this toolkit have helped you define those goals.) As you work toward achieving those goals, what changes or outcomes do you expect to see?

Top 3 Lessons Learned about Impact

1. Evaluation should be seen as learning about how we are doing and what could be done differently. Learning is not always comfortable.
2. Measuring success is difficult on issues as large and complex as poverty reduction.
3. Change is gradual and it comes from building on strengths and successes.

More Lessons Learned about Impact

Areas of Potential Impact

For community foundations, a poverty-reduction focus is likely to have an impact along several dimensions. Because community foundations have multiple functions and stakeholders it can be helpful to consider how your actions may create change on several levels – within your foundation, on your relationships between your organization and other stakeholders, on the prevalence and acuteness of poverty in your community (through your actions and the work of your grant recipients), and perhaps even on a larger scale.