Community Scale Document

The proposed Community Scaling Tool can be used to facilitate a number of processes within the daily operations and annual cycles of an agency. Because the five dimensions of the tool are designed to be broadly inclusive of the major components of "community," the tool is helpful in examining both conditions in the community and systems of interaction. Therefore, an agency can use the same tool as the framework to assess community problems, plan interventions to effect change, measure incremental progress towards change, and re-assess agency strategies (see Figure 1). Once staff become familiar with the tool, they will see the additional benefit of using the same, common framework to assess, plan, measure, and re-assess a wide variety of programs and approaches, such as the change in the attitudes of a local advisory board, the effectiveness of collaboration between social service providers, the availability of work experiences for teenagers, the correlation between child care and adult employment, the extent of gaps in the service delivery system, the change in conditions associated with poverty, and the range of volunteer opportunities available to youth, adults, and the elderly.

The tool can be used internally, with an agency's strategic planning process, to identify goals and timelines for the action steps the agency will take to achieve a community level outcome. An agency may correlate its goals with the Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) Monitoring and Assessment Task Force (MATF) National Goals, and the action steps may be reported on within the funding cycle for CSBG. Because many community level outcomes are achieved by continuous work through several annual funding cycles, the tool gives agencies a consistent framework to place their annual activities in the context of the long-term goals.

Figure 1: Using the Community Scaling Tool in Assessment, Planning, Measurement, and Re-Assessment

The tool can also be used externally to facilitate better communication, strategic planning, public relations, and cooperation among the local players in a collaborative process. By presenting the framework of the scaling tool to guide discussion, the agency can place the work of the collaboration into the greater context of the community -an essential element of effective advocacy. The local collaboration may opt to adapt the definitions of incremental change to reflect their specific conditions, and the agency can still respond to requests for information that can be aggregated by using the dimensions outlined in the template.

And finally, the scaling tool creates an environment in which an agency can explain the lack of change at the community or family levels instead of trying to justify all activities as having measurable community impact. The scaling tool can explain lack of change because of the shortage of resources, mitigating factors, or other variables which apply to family and community level change. Environment factors that present barriers to change for individuals, such as the lack of affordable day care or an inadequate number of jobs which pay a living wage, can be explained in context using this tool.

A Cautionary Note: This tool was designed specifically to be broadly inclusive of community conditions and systems in part, to provide an agency with a comfort zone in which they can raise questions about troublesome community problems. The authors were acutely aware that any tool designed to show progress towards community solutions could potentially be used to assign blame or failure to agencies unable to show success.

Therefore, agencies are encouraged to:

understand the distinctions between family level, agency level and community level outcomes. Only use this tool for assessing, planning, measuring and reassessing community level change.

establish realistic indicators for change which represent the total range of possible community-wide solutions. Do not select indicators solely on the basis of whiter those indicators make your agency look successful when compared to other community partners.

See Table 2 for a complete listing of the advantages of using the Community Scaling Tool.

Table 2: Dispelling the Myths About the Community Scaling Tool