Anticipating Your Impact

Reduction in Poverty in Your Community

Ultimately, your overall goal will be to reduce the amount and/or severity of poverty in your community. While this may sound straightforward, making real change in this domain is very challenging. In most cases change to the economic situation of an individual or family will not be the result of a single or short-term intervention. Given the multiplicity of factors at work, your foundation's impact may be hard to attribute. In order to evaluate your impact on reducing poverty you will need to take a realistic and long-term view.

Another challenge is that much of your work is done through intermediaries – your grant recipients. You must depend on them to track and report the impact of their work. But you can standardize your reporting requirements to encourage capturing relevant and comparable data that makes it easier to aggregate the impact of individual grants. And many community foundations interested in evaluating the impact of their work provide support to grantees in learning about evaluation.

Goals that could be evaluated over time for the community might include:

• Increased secondary school completion rates
• Increased primary school test scores
• Higher employment rates
• Higher average wages
• Reduced use of food banks, shelters, and other poverty alleviation services
• Fewer people experiencing homelessness
• Increased affordable housing
• More after-school learning and sport programs
• Lower poverty rates