New Door Ventures (NDV) is a nonprofit in San Francisco’s Mission District committed to helping youth living in high-risk situations to prepare for work and life through job training and community building. Using social enterprise as a means to help young people find work, NDV is dedicated to supporting the development of each client’s unique potential. Its programs reflect the belief that lasting change comes through supportive relationships among individuals and the mutual support of a larger community.
Having recently completed a rebranding process, the NDV leadership wanted to think more carefully about how it served its clients and developed rubrics for measuring its impact. Familiar with BTW’s reflective but rigorous style, NDV approached us to lead them through a theory of change process that would culminate in an outcomes-measurement system that could be implemented by staff.
It was important both to scale this system appropriately to the nonprofit’s capacity and to match it to the organization’s theory of change. To align NDV’s theory with practice, BTW led the organization through a three-phase process.
- First, NDV leaders and staff articulated the organizational theory of change that captured the organization’s deep commitment to helping youth find meaningful work, build life skills and have a sense of belonging in a caring and supportive community of peers and adults.
- Second, we worked with NDV to design an evaluation plan that would track and assess progress toward goals, addressing NDV’s desire to measure how well it was serving its clients.
- Finally, the project team guided NDV in developing metrics and indicators to use in their new Efforts to Outcomes (ETO) tracking system.
By the close of this three-phase process, NDV staff not only had a logical road map for change and an evaluation plan, but had increased their internal capacity for gathering data to assess their program’s impact in a way that fit within their existing capacity and systems.
NDV staff are now able to tell a very compelling story of the young people who benefit from their program. At the close of the 2008 program year, NDV could report a 43% increase in the number of youth they served and paint a clear picture of why these young people, ages 14 to 21, need assistance to find and hold employment:
• 54% had a history in the justice system;
• 52% had been in the foster care system;
• 52% had dropped out of high school;
• 51% had a history of drug or substance abuse;
• 43% had been homeless or lived in a shelter or transitional home; and
• 18% were parenting before the age of 21.
With an articulated theory of change and clear data, NDV is able to continuously improve the quality of its services and understand how to match services to the needs of its participants.
