(Illustration by Taslim van Hattum)
As more foundations orient toward building community power, assessing progress becomes a critical challenge. Short-term grant cycles do not neatly line up with the long-term arc of social change, and when funding for community power building can’t match the resources of those who wield power, measuring progress is particularly challenging (especially when grant makers without direct experience in building community power have unrealistic expectations).
This difficulty makes it all the more essential, however, for community-based organizations—and the foundations that support them—to assess progress, for reflection, learning, and course correction. Building power has its moments of triumph as well as its many setbacks and detours, but overall progress and the status of long-term goals must be measured. Precisely because significant change takes years or decades, we must ensure that we are moving in the right direction.
As a simplified way to think about measures of community power, there are three interrelated scales at which grassroots organizations are building power: societal, base, and organizational capacity. In providing examples of indicators at each scale, based on efforts from the field, we draw both from our past experiences working in power-building organizations in California and Minnesota and also from our current work at university research centers studying efforts to build community power.
Progress toward community power can be measured—and we provide a framework for how to do it—but methods and metrics should be specifically determined by grantees. They are in a position to design measurement that fits their goals, as well as the contexts in which they are operating. In addition, imposing metrics on grantees reproduces the power dynamics that historically marginalized groups according to race, gender, class, and immigration status, and that deny them the ability to fully participate in and effectively influence the decisions that affect their lives.
1. Measuring at the Societal Scale
Every organization has long-term aspirations in its vision and mission statement, and if we compiled these statements, we would see remarkable overlap on the broadest goals. How we get there is less clear, however; the most effective path forward is always shifting with changes in political context. To have an idea of how the particular movement in which you are participating is making progress toward that shared vision, you must measure both visible and invisible impact at the societal scale.
For the former, time-bound campaigns with specific goals are necessary vehicles through which groups build power to achieve their visions and are important indicators of progress in power building at the societal level.
For example, in 2012, a Minnesota coalition called Our Vote Our Future worked to defeat a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would require a photo ID card to vote. It was an essential campaign to protect democracy in the state: if the amendment had passed, thousands of Minnesotans (especially low-income voters of color, elderly people, working poor, and young people) would have seen their right to vote limited. Initial polling showed the campaign seriously behind, and many political players deemed the campaign a lost cause. When Our Vote Our Future defied the odds and defeated the constitutional amendment, they won, in part, because they had built a large and active constituency base and were effective in changing the minds of thousands of voters. It was an indicator of progress: Minnesotans were open to listening to the campaign’s arguments and to changing their minds, something that may not have been true in previous years.
A less visible indicator of power is the ability to set and advance an agenda. After successfully stopping the voter ID requirement, the organizations involved in Our Vote Our Future were able to advance multiple bills at the legislature the following year. To measure the ability to set the agenda in the state, the coalition could have tracked the bills introduced during the 2012 legislative session and compared that to the 2013 season (and beyond).
Another less visible measure of power at the societal scale is the ability to influence mindsets, underlying assumptions, and culture. These are the tectonic plates of social change—slow-moving, large in scale, and foundational for all change efforts—and they make up what is often called the “dominant narrative” (not to be confused with the messaging used to win a campaign).
For example, in 2016, a range of community organizations in Minnesota organized around a narrative-change campaign that advanced, through changes in language and visuals, a long-term vision of dignity and joy for all people in the state. Following this campaign, researchers were able to track noticeable shifts in the language used by gubernatorial candidates. While the campaign didn’t lead directly to a short-term policy or electoral victory, producing a shift in the narrative indicates the organizing ecosystem’s power to influence civic discourse in the state—a power that is critical to overcoming attitudinal barriers to change such as anti-tax sentiment and distrust of government.
2. Measuring the People Power of the Organized Base
The core work of building power in marginalized communities is organizing a constituency base and developing leaders among its members. In the most general sense, this base consists of both the targets of power-building efforts (members of communities that have been historically marginalized) and the agents of these efforts (activists and engaged voters from all backgrounds), with considerable overlap between the two.
(Illustration by Taslim van Hattum)
The power of this membership base can be measured in a variety of ways. The most common measures of this organizational “people power” are size and diversity of the membership base, number of members taking on leadership roles, and number of grassroots leaders. For The California Endowment’s “Building Healthy Communities” initiative, surveys of organizing groups also captured geographic reach and focus, scale of campaigns and campaign targets, roles of residents in campaigns, and a set of organizing capacity and sustainability indicators, such as budget and staffing size.
Beyond measures of size and scale, what matters for the exercise of power in the world are certain attributes of the membership base. As discussed in Prisms of the People, successful community power-building organizations have constituency bases that are independent (able to make strategic decisions and accountable to each other), committed (connected to each other through interconnected relationships that develop a sense of responsibility to each other and the cause), and flexible (able to adapt to the shifting political terrain).
An organization can learn a great deal by tracking who is in its constituency base and what they are doing. In turn, this allows an organization to better understand the independence, commitment, and flexibility of the base. What relationships do people have with each other? Are they repeatedly taking action? Are they accountable to each other? How easily do they pivot as the terrain they are operating on shifts?
For example, an organization that is committed to building a multi-racial, multi-generational base of people who build deep relationships within and across lines of difference will want to track age and race alongside traditional information like name and contact information. They will also want to track activities that reflect the members’ investment in each other and the organization, such as attendance at public events, social gatherings, and one-on-one meetings. This will allow them to track progress toward a base that is committed to each other in an interconnected lattice of relationships.
People experience deeply personal transformations through organizing work. For example, a 2011 leadership program of the National Domestic Workers Alliance demonstrated that it is possible to capture observable measures of transformation among domestic worker organizers and worker-leaders, through factors like confidence, comfort with stepping into leadership and action, deep patience and commitment, ability to assess a situation or an individual more objectively in historical context, personal and collective resilience, dignity for self and others, and trust and connections with self and others. These are the less visible attributes of people that lead to public actions and bold stances and become a force for social change.
3. Measuring Organizational Capacity
Organizational structure and capacities are too often seen as separate from power building efforts, but design choices internal to an organization—what we call “collective capabilities”—are essential to a constituency base’s ability to wield power. As described in the P3 Lab’s report on understanding and measuring people power:
“Organizations have to act like prisms, transforming their resources (people, who are their potential power) into the public exercise of power. Their ability to enact this transformation depends on the design choices they make at the heart of the prism. Those design choices are their collective capabilities.”
Given the importance of these design choices to building power, funders, and community-power organizations should consider an organization’s progress in building these capacities when assessing power-building efforts.
- Does the organization have transparent decision-making processes that ensure accountability to the constituency base?
- Have the organization’s leaders developed strategies to integrate learning into their daily routines and then apply what they’ve learned?
- Do they build space into people’s work plans to allow for flexibility in times of change?
Asking and answering questions like these can help an organization and its funders assess how the organization is building the internal capacities necessary for building external power.
Organizations should identify the capacities in greatest need of development and then invite a range of people, including staff and members, to assess these capacities and the organization’s progress in building them. The organization can then use this data to identify what has led to their success, identify opportunities for additional growth, and track their progress in building these capacities. Two examples can be found on the P3 Lab website, where we’ve created a guide to understanding and assessing your organization’s strategic capacity and a report on developing structures that support effective and resilient coalitions.
A Final Message to Foundations
The path to building power among historically marginalized communities is complex, dynamic, and long term. While organizations must develop their own approach to measuring progress, it takes time and organizational resources to do so. This is where you come in: Rather than funding a third-party evaluator that reports to you, you should support organizations with the resources to develop their own capacity. Then when grantees develop approaches to measure their progress in building power, we encourage you to walk alongside them, understand your own power, and make choices to be in mutual support and relationship with those who have the most to gain in the struggle for equity, sustainability, and justice.
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Read more stories by Jane Booth-Tobin & Jennifer Ito.