Community Scale Document

The Community Scaling Tool can be used by an agency to assess community conditions and systems, plan for change, measure whether change has or has not occurred, determine the amount of change, and re-assess the agency's continued interventions. The agency must ask itself, "What, specifically, is going to change?" as a result of the planned interventions and strategies. If the answer is a condition of Public Policy, Equity, Civic Capital, Economic Opportunity, or a Service and Support Systems change, the agency should identify specific indicators it will seek to measure whether or not change has occurred. (For other possible answers to this question, see page , Relationship of Family, Community, and Agency Scales.) See Table 3 for six quick steps for using the Community Scaling Tool.

An agency will use the specific indicators to create a subscale applicable to its work. An agency may use only one column (dimension) of this matrix to describe its work on a specific community problem, or it may find that its activities bridge several dimensions. An agency would create a subscale for each dimension for which it wishes to show results.

Table 3: Six Quick Steps for Using the Community Scale

As an example of how to use the six quick steps, a community action agency identified a lack of affordable housing as one of the major barriers affecting the ability of clients in its self-sufficiency program to achieve success. Although the problem was identified through assessments of individual clients, the agency decided to undertake a community level strategy for solving the problem. Table 4 outlines the use of the six quick steps for this agency's first year of interventions. The six quick steps can be repeated for subsequent years of multi-year projects such as this one. A more in-depth narrative of this project can be found on page of this document. Tables 10 and 11 on pages 19 and 20 contain the detailed subscales referred to in Step 4 of Table 4.

Table 4: The Six Quick Steps for a Housing Project (Year 1)