Evaluation and Learning Partner for Community-Based Organizations and Funders December 2025
Reflections from Success Measures’ Co-Leaders
This past year has been a period of profound transition all of us. And five months ago, Success Measures’ leadership transitioned to a co-leadership model amidst the changing external environment. We have navigated the shifting landscape by anchoring ourselves to the origins of Success Measures and following our North Star – our vision for residents shaping the changes they want to see in their communities.
Throughout its 20-year history, Success Measures has successfully navigated multiple inflection points—from the foreclosure crisis to the pandemic to today’s resource-constrained environment—by centering our vision and principles. We have walked alongside community-based organizations to help them tell their stories, rooted in lived experience and resilience, as they work towards a community-centered future. And, in support of that vision, we worked with philanthropy to build their muscle for centering grantee and community perspectives as a critical consideration for decision-making. This focus is as vital as ever.
We have always used learning and listening to bridge stories and systems, lived experience and institutional strategy. We’ve shared our grassroots participatory work nationally to help community-based organizations and funders understand “difficult-to-measure” indicators of change. It all laid the groundwork to propel us forward into a hopeful future where community-based organizations have the evidence and agency to influence the narratives shaping policy, investment and opportunity.
This year, we continued to listen. We heard from partners working directly with communities about the importance of prioritizing the protection of not only of data and information, but also the protection of people and their experiences. With that new understanding, we worked with organizations and our cadre of consultants to rethink and recalibrate community engagement and evaluation activities in order to more holistically protect residents. We continue to tap into our networks to share new practices and learn from each other. We remain deeply committed to carrying out evaluation and learning in ways that build trust, transparency and accountability across geographies, organizations and people. We are grateful to our partners—the organizations, consultants and our staff—that make this possible.
The strengths and experiences of our changing team have deepened and broadened our evaluation practice. Over the last three years, we welcomed new staff who brought an array of skills, experience and perspective: expertise in additional areas of evaluation, learning and social enterprise, as well as significant experience working across different parts of the housing and community development sectors. We’ve continued to live our values by learning and reflecting together as we nurture novel ideas and try new things.
When we look ahead, we are grateful for our predecessors and hopeful for what is next. We carry forward lessons from the past: authentic partnership matters, community-centered evaluation builds transparency and accountability, and collective learning forges new paths towards a brighter future. We will continue to co-lead by leaning into our complementary strengths and the shared conviction that collective learning drives meaningful change.
If you are navigating similar journeys or seeking a thought partner, we invite you to reach out to share what you’re seeing on the ground, explore a new partnership or rekindle conversations. We hope to listen and learn alongside you and your communities in the new year.
Lynne Wallace Vice President, Success Measures Business Development & Operations
lwallace@nw.org
Learning with Enterprise and their Thome Aging Well Scaling What Works Grantees
by Lana Jacobus and Katie Kristensen
A large conference room began to buzz with energy as attendees convened for Enterprise Community Partners’ event, Celebrating the Thome Aging Well Program’s Scale What’s Working Grantees. The occasion brought over 70 grantees, partners, and funders together for a celebration of their ongoing efforts and learning exchange. Among them was Katie Kristensen, Manager of Equitable Evaluation for Success Measures, who was present to share evaluative learning from the program.
In 2024, Success Measures was selected to provide Enterprise with insights and analysis about key aspects of the Thome Scale What’s Working grantee experience. Enterprise sought to understand grantees’ experiences in serving older adults. This included understanding how grantees were scaling their existing programs or barriers to doing so, facilitators, and strategies they implemented along the way.
Since most of the evaluation took place remotely, September's gathering offered an opportunity to contextualize what was happening on the ground with the evaluation's observations, as well as make in-person connections among grantees, partners and the Enterprise team.
Storytelling in Evaluation with the National Collaborative for Health Equity
by Lana Jacobus and Katie Kristensen
In 2022, the nonprofit organization National Collaborative for Health Equity (NCHE) welcomed its first cohort of 40 leaders into its Culture of Health Leadership Institute for Racial Healing (CoHLI). From the beginning, NCHE recognized it was a story that needed to be told.
While evaluation was already embedded into the design of the program, NCHE wanted to capture the story of the program and its leaders. They sought an evaluation partner experienced in assessing initiatives grounded in human experience and one capable of communicating impact through the lens of leaders’ lived realities. Success Measures met this need by designing a learning process rooted in shared values, reflection and storytelling.
WHC is a nonprofit organization that acquires and preserves rental housing in the Greater Washington DC Area. Success Measures will be a learning partner to WHC and carry out a learning and evaluation strategy to demonstrate how WHC is making a difference through their reimagining of housing as a platform for wealth building, economic mobility and opportunity for moderate- and low-income residents.
“The Success Measures team’s expertise will be instrumental in helping us advance our impact,” said Kimberly Driggins, CEO of WHC. “They’ll build on our longstanding commitment to learning and evaluation to ensure we are meeting our goal to use housing as a means to create opportunity and economic mobility for families and individuals in the Washington, DC region.” Read more from the Washington Housing Conservancy from their press release.
For more information about this project please reach out to Rebecca Piatt, the project lead, at rpiatt@nw.org.
Where You Found Us
While the team does not have any upcoming conferences to highlight, we reflect on one of the attended conferences this past fall:
"Attending OFN41 in Washington, D.C. was a meaningful chance to both reconnect with long-time colleagues and meet new peers equally committed to advancing community-driven impact across the community development finance ecosystem. The conference offered a chance to be in community during these challenging times and underscored just how critical collaboration, adaptive capital and relationships are to our work. I came away inspired by the collective leadership in the field and encouraged by the opportunity for centering community voice and supporting organizations on the ground who are living out long-term resiliency in their communities."
Lynne Wallace, Vice President, Success Measures Business Development & Operations
Out of Office Messages
The Success Measures team is looking forward to our end-of-year break! Our office will be closed from December 24th to January 2nd. We asked a few members of our team what they’re looking forward to during their time off:
Katie Kristensen: I’m planning on fully embracing an unstructured week, lots of rest, cooking nice meals, and a general commitment to doing as little as possible. I’ll also be chipping away at our family holiday newsletter and taking the dog out for long, chilly walks (he’s thrilled; I’m negotiating).
Art Garcia: This is my time to recharge. I love spending time with family and friends, laughing, hugging, eating all the warm holiday treats, and enjoying all the outdoor “winter” activities like finding elves hiding in Santa’s village, family pictures wearing cozy sweaters, or drinking hot cocoa.
Calece Johnson: Before the holiday this season, my family is heading abroad to explore the holiday markets in Germany and skiing in Austria. It will be my husband’s first time abroad and our biggest adventure yet as a family. We make it back just in time to host Christmas Eve open house and rest before kids go back to college.
Rebecca Piatt: I’m looking forward to spending time with family over the holidays and exploring our nearby holiday light displays. My neighborhood mom’s group is putting on a “noon” year’s eve party (at 12pm rather than 12am), which feels like the perfect idea for tired parents to celebrate the new year!
The Success Measures team wishes you a happy new year!
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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