Evaluation and Learning Partner for Community-Based Organizations and Funders July 2026
Happy summer!
The Success Measures team has experienced a fulfilling year. In addition to project work, our team connected with partners and colleagues at conferences, contributed to field learning through webinar presentations and conference sessions, and has had the opportunity to listen to community members in support of the meaningful work of our clients.
In our personal lives, we also found ways to participate in community and place-making. Back in April, several members of our team celebrated the importance of being good stewards of our planet with their friends and family. You can read more about what we've been up to in this month's newsletter below.
We hope you enjoy (or take cool shelter from) the warm weather!
Jessica Anders-Mulcahy and Lynne Wallace
Participating in the "Better Together" Convening with the Regional Foundation
Grantees and partners during the breakout session "Community Leadership & Philanthropy in Action in Newark, NJ." Image courtesy of the IndieLifeMedia.
Our long time partner, the Regional Foundation (RF), hosted their annual partner gathering in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania under the theme “Better Together” in late March of this year. The foundation supports grantees focused on community level change in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. RF’s model brings together a constellation of resources for partners and grantees to lean into to support their ongoing planning and implementation work. Success Measures serves as an evaluation technical assistance provider.
Arturo (Art) Garcia, Jr., senior director, Success Measures Evaluation Services, leads our work with RF. He was excited to trek across the U.S. (from California!) to participate in the convening to connect with and learn from community partners and grantees. The convening was all about learning together, creating spaces to elevate resident leadership, reflect on the Regional Foundation’s vision and highlight how public-private partnerships can help address community challenges and advance local priorities.
Jessica Anders-Mulcahy's Reflections of the 2026 GEO Conference
In April, Jessica Anders-Mulcahy, vice president, Success Measures Evaluation, attended the 2026 GEO conference in Boston. Jessica shared her reflections on her experience.
There is something wonderful that happens when you spend nearly three days in a room full of people who have chosen, in their own way, to envision a better world and hold a curiosity about how to get there. The 2026 Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO) conference was an inspiring place to be.
The conference created the opportunity to openly engage with complex questions: What are ways that philanthropy is thinking about supporting infrastructure and what does it mean to support whole ecosystems? How can systems be built to support place-based work across extended time periods? And, undergirding it all, how do we hold ourselves accountable within the context of love — love of place, shared humanity and ourselves?
Success Measures and NeighborWorks America® Kick Off the Fifth Round of the Community Impact Project
For decades, the community development field has pursued understanding how community-based organizations contribute to neighborhood change. This critical understanding has been a north star as the field has gained a deeper understanding of the importance of measuring broader community change as well as housing production.
NeighborWorks and Success Measures have been partnering for over 10 years to work with NeighborWorks network organizations to help measure this impact. Network organizations are supported by Success Measures through remote technical assistance. Success Measures helps these organizations execute neighborhood observations and surveys, and gather secondary and administrative information about their community through PolicyMap, an online data and mapping tool that aggregates publicly-available and proprietary data to better understand the community. Participating organizations have used these evaluation and learning efforts to unearth critical information that they use to engage with communities, deepen partnerships, and tell their stories of change.
In our practice, we have seen a steady demand from organizations for ad hoc, capacity building evaluation technical assistance (TA). The types of TA range widely, from developing discrete products, thought partnership, and facilitation of longer-term participatory processes.
Most opportunities for evaluation TA exist within the context of grant programs or initiatives marked by specific activities and a preexisting timeline. This environment supports TA focused on completing the project rather than on building the evaluation capacity of the organization. We’ve observed the recurring challenge of finding ways to resource TA, in terms of programmatic structure and funding, so that it puts the decision-making regarding the focus and timing of the assistance in the hands of the TA recipient.
In mid-March, Success Measures was invited to speak on a webinar for the Washington Evaluators, a professional society devoted to fostering state-of-the-art knowledge and information sharing about evaluation. The panel, including Success Measures, talked about the value of capacity-building technical assistance for community-based organizations. The interactive discussion, moderated by Ivana Miranda, president of Washington Evaluators, was an opportunity to discuss the importance of TA among our evaluation peers. Given the audience, we chose to talk about our work with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation providing on-demand TA to their Healthy Communities grantees. It provided a concrete example of what a TA effort could look like and provided a springboard for broader conversation.
Katie Kristensen Talks Storytelling at the Collective Impact Summit
In mid-April, Katie Kristensen, manager, Equitable Evaluation, and Christina Johnson presented at the Collective Impact Forum Summit, sharing their session "Storytelling as Evidence in Equity-Centered Evaluation". Christina Johnson, program associate at the National Collaborative for Health (NCHE), was the client lead for the evaluation of the evaluation of NCHE’s Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing (CoHLI). The two leaders presented on behalf of the larger teams that worked on the evaluation.
Success Measures, in partnership with Datashine, used storytelling to evaluate the community and field-level impacts of the program. They shared why they chose this approach, how it expanded findings, and the step-by-step process of incorporating storytelling into evaluation. Overall, they framed storytelling as both a rigorous method for generating evidence and centering participant voice in the evaluation.
Supporting Purpose Prize Winners to Tell Their Stories of Impact
A core part of our work is building the capacity of organizations in a variety of fields to articulate their contribution to the change and impact in their communities. Our model, which includes working in partnership with an expert cadre of consultants, facilitates matchmaking the organizations with a technical assistance (TA) provider who can meet their specific needs. Our work with AARP embodies this approach.
Since 2020, Success Measures has had the privilege of supporting the AARP Purpose Prize awardees by providing TA to build their evaluation capacity. The award honors extraordinary older Americans who support AARP’s mission of empowering people to choose how they live as they age.
Arturo Garcia, Jr. Selected to Participate in the Transforming the Evaluation Ecosystem (TREE) Community of Practice
Art Garcia, Jr., center back row in a grey sweater, pictured with his cohort members for their first convening.
Art Garcia, Jr., was selected to participate in the Transforming the Evaluation Ecosystem (TREE) Community of Practice. The Annie E. Casey Foundation partnered with Lift Every Voice to recruit 10 evaluators across the country to participate in a year-long cohort. The goal of the community of practice is to strengthen leadership, sustainability, and visibility for independent evaluators while supporting broader field-building efforts to advance the evaluation ecosystem.
TREE offers space for practitioners to learn together, build meaningful relationships, and collectively shape how the evaluation ecosystem functions and who it centers. Cohort members will also engage with The Sage Circle, a small group of experienced evaluation leaders who have achieved outstanding field visibility in their Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation (CREE) practice.
“I’m extremely excited to participate in this year’s inaugural TREE Community of Practice cohort," Garcia said. "This is a great opportunity to not only support my continued growth as an evaluator and leader, but to strengthen our work at Success Measures and continue meeting the present needs of our communities. The convening in Baltimore was grounding and I feel connected to all my cohort members. I’m looking forward to learning from my peers and leaders in the field over the next year.”
Supporting Community-Based Organizations in Southern California
Art Garcia Jr. (far right) and other guest judges from the community listen as community organizations tell their stories of impact.
The IEHP Foundation launched a Storytelling for Advocacy & Fundraising Cohort in early 2026 to strengthen the nonprofit voices in Inland Empire, an inland metropolitan region in Southern California close to Los Angeles. The program was made up of an eight-class training program. It supported nonprofit leaders representing 20 organizations with practical storytelling frameworks, tools and peer support. The IEHP Foundation invited Art Garcia to be a guest judge.
Earth Day is meaningful to the Success Measures team outside of work, and members celebrated in their personal lives by spending time outside.
Art Garcia: My son has been learning about Earth Day in school through art and other lessons, sparking family conversations about the Earth. We talked to him about all the different ways we can steward the environment to keep the air, water and land clean, and take care of all the animals and insects.
Art's son's artwork, pictured right.
Rebecca Piatt: I attended a local Earth Day festival in my neighborhood with my family. My 2-year-old son especially enjoyed seeing a demonstration put on by our parks department featuring a live turtle and snake local to northern Virginia.
Jessica Anders-Mulcahy: My 9 year-olds learned about the importance of taking care of our planet, made models of the Earth out of recycled materials, and did a clean up in the neighborhood surrounding their school. They returned from the activities with ideas about changes we can make in our household that promote living in harmony with the Earth.
Katie Kristensen: I went on a hike with a group of friends and my pup Rodeo. We identified wildflowers and saw many blooming paw paw trees.
Lana Jacobus: I picked up trash around a large creek at a local park. The trash pick-up was led by these passionate scuba divers who feel strongly about keeping the oceans clean. Our group of 20 picked up 100 pounds of trash in a small area!
Lana (right), pictured in Rock Creek Park, a large urban park in Washington, DC.
Success Measures, a social enterprise at NeighborWorks America since 2004, provides evaluation, learning and strategy consulting, technical assistance, tools and technology to organizations and funders looking to understand how their programs and investments are changing lives and improving communities. To all of our work, we bring a commitment to intentional, equitable assessments that help residents, nonprofits and foundations understand and strengthen their impact through collaborative evaluation and learning processes that are inclusive, practical and purposeful.
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