OneAmerica
Policy Change Through Community Power-Building
“The evaluation strategy Social Insights developed was exactly what we needed to move forward with a meaningful assessment of our leaders.”
— Elisabeth Vasquez Hein
Senior Manager of Leadership Development
THE CHALLENGE
OneAmerica® was founded after September 11, 2001 in response to the growing hate crimes and racism directed toward immigrant communities of color. They are the largest immigrant and refugee advocacy organization in Washington State and lead statewide and national coalitions working on immigrant rights, education, economic and environmental justice, voting rights, and immigrant integration.The challenge is to 1) evaluate the steps the organization is taking to develop broad-based movements led by people of color and their allies 2) evaluate the outcomes of their grassroots community organizing 3) develop innovative metrics to assess the growth of community-based power and leadership.
THE APPROACH
The organization is transitioning into creating evaluation processes integrated through all levels of their organization. The approach included strategies to build capacity to measure and better evaluate successes and gaps across programs, processes for the development of an organizational dashboard to track metrics, and the creation of data collection systems that prioritize the voices of community leaders.
HIGHLIGHTS
1. The first evaluation process was piloted and implemented with a multi-region workgroup.
2. A survey of diverse stakeholders gathered hundreds comments that provided a clear picture of the programs’ influence state-wide and in local communities.
3. New leadership assessment metrics were developed to measure change beyond counting hours spent in meetings and attendance.
“OneAmerica and the Road Map Project has steered a group that has resulted in tangible policy changes, which has positively impacted the communities that I work in.”
“It has contributed to my community leadership by hearing different perspectives and experiences from other educators in our Road Map Region. Hearing different voices has allowed me to reassess the areas where I work and incorporate practices that the educators have successfully used.”