Measuring impact of community development programs in the City of Hume

For the past three years members of the Hume Learning Community, City of Hume, Melbourne, Victoria, have been working as a Community of Practice to trial a cost/benefit analysis approach to measure the impact of individual learning city programs. This approach is adapted from the Robin Hood Foundation in New York.

Introduction by Ken Thompson, Chair of Hume Learning Community, City of Hume, Melbourne, Victoria

A common challenge for Not For Profit (NFP) organisations in the local area was the pressure from funding bodies to demonstrate the impact of the programs they were funding. Behind this was the need to for NFPs to run programs repeatedly over time. An examination of the local demographic data showed that local population turnover was relatively high, meaning there were new people coming into the district all the time who needed the programs.

But what of the impact? A tip and a search led to the work of the Robin Hood Foundation (RHF) (New York), which proved to be promising. Some local discussions about how to adapt the RHF approach led to a model that was tested in some case studies. The approach had to be powerful, but also not be time and resource intensive.

This new publication shares some early case studies using the adapted RHF approach, and what has been learned from them. The case studies seem to provide a strong proof of concept and learnings are discussed in the publication.

Further case studies are being researched and will be published at a future time.
 
Further References:

• Weinstein, M. M., & Bradburd, R. M. (2013). The Robin Hood Rules for Smart Giving. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Robyn Hood Foundation. (2013). Robyn Hood Metrics  Retrieved 14 April, 2015, from https://www.robinhood.org/metrics