At Pace Center for Girls, we understand that, for girls to change their lives, they and their families must have a voice in shaping their present and futures.  This is why during the past 35 years, we have elevated the voices of more than 40,000 girls.  Providing year-round academic and social services through a gender responsive, trauma-informed, and strength-based lens, Pace has used feedback to change the life trajectories of girls who are likely to have experienced risk factors associated with delinquency and adverse childhood experiences.

We have invested time and effort in developing our feedback loops because they support our mission, culture, and contribute to the success of our girls. We use ‘real-time’ data to help inform our services and ensure our program addresses our participants' needs and helps enhance their strengths. We believe that our ability to listen, reflect, and act on the feedback received from our girls and their families, our team members and community partners, contributes to quality improvement efforts, enhances innovation in our programs and bolsters our social impact. Below, we share a few lessons from our implementation of feedback loops.

Feedback keeps us on track on our mission by elevating girls’ voices. Feedback not only gives Pace an opportunity to advocate for girls, but to support girls in advocating for themselves. Collecting and using feedback offers opportunities for our girls to learn how to voice opinions, problem-solve and develop self-efficacy skills.  For example, girls and team members work together on selecting the questions of our service experience survey.  Girls make sure the questions target issues they experience, like interactions with their teachers, and team members translate these experiences to our culture values, in this case developing partnerships with teachers.

Read the full article about Pace Center for Girls by Lymari Benitez at Charity Navigator.