COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL CAPITAL:
A GUIDE TO PROGRAM EVALUATION
This guide is intended to equip you with the tools you need to measure the impact of your program on your community, improve the effectiveness of services delivered, and enable you to claim credit for the community benefits that your organization is creating.
We live in an era of increased focus on the bottom-line, and consequently, lacking in tools to quantify abstract concepts, we underinvest in programs whose impacts are difficult to measure. Social capital is an excellent example of this phenomenon.
For example, in the service delivery world (social work, medical care, and the like), programs are typically funded and reimbursed for services rendered. As a result, programs document and measure various elements involved in the delivery of services—such as the number of hours of daycare provided, number of vaccinations given, number of job placements made, number of people housed in shelters. However, these measurements ignore the social capital health of communities, despite our intuitive awareness that strong communities are essential to the effectiveness of any such program.
This guide is intended to provide a means for measuring social capital. Once measured, we hope that service organizations and funders will publicize the impact their programs have on building social capital. These findings can then be used to justify further investments.
