What is Community Impact?
What is Community Impact?
United Way of Quinte believes that Community Impact is making fundamental changes to community conditions, which includes, but is not limited to allocating funds through the annual campaign.
It is about people and organizations coming together to create lasting measurable change.
How are we achieving Community Impact?
We are achieving community impact by:
- identifying the root causes of key local issues,
- developing strategies to address them,
- bringing together the funding and resources needed to get the job done, and then
- measuring the results.
The Community Impact Framework
Our community impact framework describes how we go about our work. The framework is based on four key pillars:
- Setting priorities, goals and plans with the community
- Partnerships with social service agencies and a broad range of sectors
- Aligning and mobilizing our organization’s resources to achieve our goal; and,
- Measuring and communicating about changes in communities.
We work to ensure we engage the community upfront in setting priorities, shared goals, and the steps needed to achieve them. Together we develop plans, and together define the role each community partner plays. Throughout this process, we work with our community to identify the changes we expect to see and that we will measure – the outcomes and indicators of our collective success. And we communicate the difference we’re making in communities, using the outcomes and indicators we measure as concrete evidence.
Measuring Our Community Impact
United Way of Quinte has embraced the Outcomes Measurement process and uses it to evaluate the effectiveness of our own programs and initiatives as well as those that we fund.
Our investments are aligned with identified community needs and priorities and over the next few years we will identify community specific priorities, outcomes and indicators that will help us to measure the change we are having on these areas.