I recently introduced the idea of people-centered community indicator framework as a way to engage with the reality that impact is often the result of complex tangles of interactions between an initiative and everything else going on.
This is not an abstract topic for me. In fact, it’s central to a project I have with the City of Asheville to track the impact of investments the City made using American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. We are tracking individual projects, of course, in line with the linear chain of impact I discussed last month. But I’m especially interested in the overall impact of everything that the City invested in: how to maximize it, assess it, and tell the story. That’s not something the linear chain approach can do.
Today I want to begin to explore this through the lens of a real-life example.
Among the ARPA projects funded by the City is Food Connection, a local nonprofit that rescues restaurant food that would otherwise go to waste and delivers it to individuals and institutions who need it, no questions asked. They distribute both through agency partners and using their food truck at mobile distribution sites. The project is classified on the City’s dashboard under food systems, with the goal to “promote and support a more equitable food system from farm to disposal.”
In the context of the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), food systems relate to two of the five main categories: economic stability (which includes food insecurity) and neighborhood and built environment (which includes access to healthy food). In either case, relevant metrics would obviously relate to food and there is no obvious direct link to the other three categories: education access and quality, health care access and quality, and social and community context.
Not wrong, but is that all there is to it?
When we met recently with Food Connection staff, I was delighted to learn that the performance kickoff meeting I led last year actually spurred them to start thinking beyond the obvious metrics and to get curious about other ways their service affected clients’ lives. A series of conversations and food truck distribution site visits since then reveals a much more interesting picture of impact than a couple food-related metrics would capture.
The first thing I learned is that the people don’t only use the service because they can’t afford food.
For some the Food Connection truck is about saving time, not money. A woman interviewed in this video is going to school full-time while continuing to work and raise a family. Food Connection meals mean that one night a week she can take a break. Buying a little extra time makes juggling multiple jobs or going to school while working a little less stressful, and frees up time to spend with family or with friends.
For others the real challenge isn’t so much cost or time as preparation. Two people mentioned using it after a surgery, and the mobile meals also help an older veteran remain home and independent (a story echoed in this video by a woman who takes care of three elderly women). In other words, access to meals helps people who are older or managing with a temporary or chronic disability remain independent and connected to their current community.
Connection and Community
Actually, connection and community came up a lot.
For example, the distribution that takes place in a parking lot across from the Bell United Methodist Church in Leicester is a popular one. A line forms well before the truck pulls up, and it takes a while to get through, so folks hang out and do what people do: talk and socialize. Human connections begin to form.
Add that the food truck is bright, colorful, and fun; that the Food Connection driver, JB Bowles, loves being the host and interacting with everyone, learning their names and stories; and that the same Bell UMC congregation members show up every week to volunteer, and you have some powerful community building ingredients. Indeed, as Sandy Devine, the pastor of Bell UMC, put it in a later conversation, what happens around the Food Connection truck is “people not only getting food, but feeling like they have a place where they can chat and belong.”
That matters. Last year the US Surgeon General raised the alarm about an epidemic of loneliness in the United States which leads to increased risk for individuals to develop mental health issues and a risk of premature death at levels comparable to smoking daily. The “vaccine” for this new epidemic is social connection.
That connection doesn’t just happen while the food truck is there. In our conversation Rev. Devine mentioned two other programs catalyzed by the food truck. As she pointed out, “people tell you stuff when you’re standing there in a hot parking lot or a cold parking lot,” and so the church was able to learn more about issues people in the community were facing. That led to a new grant from the United Methodist Church to develop two new community-based programs: a support group for grandparents taking care of grandchildren who are looking for connection and support, and a family wellness education program to address the prevalence of childhood obesity.
Connecting to Every Category
That now ties the Food Connection efforts directly to impact in two other SDOH categories: social and community context, and health care access and quality.
That’s four of the five SDOH categories. And although I wasn’t able to investigate directly, but I suspect I would also find impact in the fifth category, education access and quality, given that there are eight distribution points associated with youth and education, from the PODS program and In Real Life (Asheville Middle School) to PEAK Academy and multiple early learning programs.
Now all that is not to say that the City of Asheville should require Food Connection to track metrics across all those categories. That’s well beyond the capability of a small nonprofit, and it’s even beyond the capability of the City on its own to maintain community-level metrics across all the categories.
But it is to say that engaging with the complexity of social issues presents more than just a challenge. It presents an opportunity to understand more deeply and more realistically how programs touch lives. And it gives us a way to discover connections between programs, to help agencies think more deeply about the ways that their work connects to the work of others, and to help funders think more systematically about ways to connect their own strategies and funding programs so as to multiply their impact.
Achieving all the potential of such an approach is hard. But as the brief exercise above makes clear, it’s not at all hard to begin to explore connections that might yield some excellent first steps.
Links & Thoughts
The Department of Everything. A wonderful remembrance of working in the Telephone Reference section, yesteryear’s Wikipedia, at the Brooklyn Public Library in the early 1980s. HT The Living Library.
Exploring Policy by Impact. The North Carolina Record Clearance Dashboard from the UNC School of Government Criminal Justice Innovation Lab offers an interesting way to support public policy discussion. Simple checkboxes and sliders let users make policy choices to see how many people would be impacted, broken down by race and gender.
If you want to share thoughts on anything I’ve said here or have ideas about further questions or topics you’d like me to explore, please feel free to reply to the newsletter email or contact me here.