What if the answer to a data problem is not a better system, but more people in the conversation?
That question ran through the second Impact Measurement cohort session under the Agency Capacity Builder, a program convening agencies funded by Milton Township's Mental Health Board (https://miltontownship.net/government/community-mental-health-board/). Nearly every useful move named involved bringing someone else in: staff, clients, volunteers, or another agency.
Agencies described collecting data faithfully, then rarely seeing it come back to the people who gathered it. All staff want to see the outcomes. Time is the constraint, not willingness: teams want to look at outcomes and cannot find the hours. The hardest group to reach is frontline and seasonal staff, who carry the collection and see the least of what it produces. One agency named that they are starting to see sparks in their staff, which is what progress on this actually looks like.
Two agencies brought live challenges to the group, one on tracking different metrics across many funders and accreditors, and one on knowing whether an organization's founding philosophy is genuinely practiced. The second turned out to be a measurement question too.
The group met at World Relief Chicagoland's Village of Carol Stream office (https://worldrelief.org/chicagoland), which is both a workplace for a large team and a front door for DuPage County clients. Case management, counseling, ESL classes, and wraparound support built around the whole family. Seeing the scale and the number of people carrying it gave real weight to a morning about making data useful to the people doing the work.
Good Works Results LLC (https://www.goodworksresults.com) convenes this cohort so agencies across DuPage County have a place to bring the problems they cannot solve alone.
Proud to work alongside these agencies: C.AS.E /Glenbard Early Childhood Collaborative (https://casedupage.com), Glen Ellyn Children's Resource Center (https://gecrc.com), Glen Ellyn Youth and Family Counseling Services (https://geyfcs.org), KidsMatter (https://kidsmatter2us.org), Little Friends, Inc. (https://lilfriends.com), Midwest Shelter for Homeless Veterans, Inc. (https://mshv.org), NAMI DuPage (https://namidupage.org), Ray Graham Association (https://raygraham.org), World Relief Chicagoland (https://worldrelief.org/chicagoland), and Xilin Association (https://xilin.org). Thank you to the Milton Township Community Mental Health Board (https://miltontownship.net/government/community-mental-health-board/) for supporting this initiative.