Giving Compass' Take:

• This Giving Evidence post (first published at the Financial Times) discusses the work of a homelessness advocate in New York who sought out evidence-based programming to help low-income children and families.

• What can this example tell us about the importance of data in the nonprofit world? How are we shifting mindsets to consider impact measurement in a deeper, more meaningful way?

• Here's why listening is at the heart of this philanthropic approach.

Anne Heller has done something that I had never previously seen in my 18 years in the non-profit sector. She identified a social problem, scoured academic literature to find a solution, and then set up a nonprofit to implement it. That approach sounds jaw-droppingly obvious, but it is in fact very rare for a charity to design itself around existing evidence.

Ms. Heller had worked for the city of New York when Michael Bloomberg was mayor, running shelters for homeless families. She noticed that about 10 percent of the families who use the shelters returned repeatedly. In other words, the services which the shelters provided were not solving these people’s problems.

She learned from a search in academic reports that some of these problems are caused by stress and begin very early, resulting in poor cognitive development in early childhood. A good remedy is strengthening the parent-child bond. She searched for a program which seemed effective, was evidence-based, accessible to families and could be implemented in a city the size of New York.

Using a simple internet search, she found one: a 10-week program to coach parents of new babies, called Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up program (ABC), developed by Professor Mary Dozier of the University of Delaware. Ms. Heller wrote to Dr. Dozier and found she was interested in her findings being used in practice — which not all academics are — and had already supported a few small-scale implementations of the program in the US.

Read the full article about charities using sound evidence by Caroline Fiennes at Giving Evidence.