As more foundations orient toward building community power, assessing progress becomes a critical challenge. Short-term grant cycles do not neatly line up with the long-term arc of social change, and when funding for community power building can’t match the resources of those who wield power, measuring progress is particularly challenging (especially when grant makers without direct experience in building community power have unrealistic expectations).

This difficulty makes it all the more essential, however, for community-based organizations—and the foundations that support them—to assess progress, for reflection, learning, and course correction. Building power has its moments of triumph as well as its many setbacks and detours, but overall progress and the status of long-term goals must be measured. Precisely because significant change takes years or decades, we must ensure that we are moving in the right direction.

As a simplified way to think about measures of community power, there are three interrelated scales at which grassroots organizations are building power: societal, base, and organizational capacity. In providing examples of indicators at each scale, based on efforts from the field, we draw both from our past experiences working in power-building organizations in California and Minnesota and also from our current work at university research centers studying efforts to build community power.

Progress toward community power can be measured—and we provide a framework for how to do it—but methods and metrics should be specifically determined by grantees. They are in a position to design measurement that fits their goals, as well as the contexts in which they are operating. In addition, imposing metrics on grantees reproduces the power dynamics that historically marginalized groups according to race, gender, class, and immigration status, and that deny them the ability to fully participate in and effectively influence the decisions that affect their lives.

Read the full article about community power by Jane Booth-Tobin and Jennifer Ito at Stanford Social Innovation Review.