Fostering a Culture of Evaluation to Understand and Increase the Social Benefit of Community First Step's Activities

Community First Step is a not-for-profit community organisation in Sydney's South West, established in 1973, working with the local community to promote diversity and encourage unity. Its current vision is to support and empower people to overcome disadvantage and barriers to personal, social and economic growth by delivering inclusive and innovative services. Its key services can be characterised as Community Services, Disability Services, and Children's Services. Traditionally, the broader not-for-profit community and social services sector has typically provided services to individuals and the community with limited consideration of evaluating the impact on outcomes for its participants. Evaluation is defined as a systematic and objective process to make judgements about the worth of programs typically in relation to their effectiveness, efficiency and appropriateness (NSW Government, 2003). Instead, Monitoring is typically conducted, where management processes are periodically reported against KPIs not concerned with outcomes or questions about worth, but rather outputs (e.g. number of services delivered, the number of people supported). The Chief Executive Officer and Board of Community First Step are committed to enhancing the organisation's capacity to identify the social benefits created by its activities, and move towards the evaluation of outcomes and impacts as an integral part of the program life cycle. It is recognised that this transformation is complex and requires an investment of time over a number of years with a staged approach that sees the conduct of a series of interrelated activities building on each other to reach the long term goal for the organisation. This 12-month project represents the first phase of realising this goal. As an initial step to improve the embedded evaluation processes within Community First Step, the researcher worked to develop evaluation tools and processes for two specific programs nominated by the Chief Executive Officer (i.e. New Steps and the Youth Club) and conducted a trial to determine their utility. More importantly, the project seeks to encourage staff and systems within Community First Step to increase their awareness and confidence with evaluation so that the organisation itself may build its capacity to progress towards evaluating rather than monitoring all of its activities.