Giving Compass' Take:

•The Net Community Benefit Methodology (NCBM) developed by the Impact Investment Group (IIG), describes the components of a framework that measures community benefit for place-based programs. 

• How can donors get involved in measuring impact for communities of these programs? What are the major barriers toward meaningful community engagement?

• Here are some lessons from place-based philanthropy. 

Policymakers around the world are increasingly interested in place-based programs that use tax incentives, zoning regulations, and other measures to promote investment, economic growth, and positive changes in low-income, underdeveloped communities.

Yet the towns and cities that have used the approach—exemplified by Opportunity Zones in the United States and Enterprise Precincts in Australia—have gotten mixed results. For one, the programs have tended to reallocate existing economic resources within a community rather than generate new ones. The low-income households that were supposed to be helped often fall below new poverty thresholds and are squeezed out of their communities. And the benefits that are realized—such as increasing property values and the creation of higher-skilled employment opportunities— mostly go to landowners and savvy, mobile workers.

How did things go so wrong? How could these programs perversely end up displacing and impoverishing the people they meant to help?

We lay much of the blame on the lack of a comprehensive framework that meaningfully identifies and measures public benefits that reflect a community's unique character and helps evaluate the delivery of those positive changes.

But we must go further to identify the results that actually help communities in need and ensure place-based programs earn the policy advantages they enjoy. The Net Community Benefit Methodology (NCBM) that we at the Impact Investment Group (IIG) are developing gathers our own and other resources that can help guide us all toward robustly defining, designing, and measuring public benefits and the successful delivery of them by place-based programs. Our work-in-progress has five components:

  1. Define the Dimensions of Community Benefit
  2. Identify Indicators for Each Dimension of Community Benefits
  3. Find or Develop Data to Inform Indicators
  4. Co-design Projects
  5. Follow Up and Improve

Read the full article about improving place-based programs by Erin I. Castellas, Darren Brusnahan, Courtney Cardin & Mitra Anderson-Oliver at Stanford Social Innovation Review.