Community Scale Document

For over 30 years, Community Action Agencies have been at work helping improve the conditions in which low-income people live and helping low-income people gain a greater stake in their communities. Nationwide, the strategies these more than 1,000 agencies use are varied, reflecting the diversity of each locality's resources and pressures. This document presents a framework in which local programs can relate the commonalities of their struggles and results at the community level. The framework can also be used to stimulate collaborations between Community Action Agencies and their local partners.

The National Community Services Block Grant Monitoring and Assessment Task Force has established two national goals for explaining the results of the work the Community Action Network does at the community level: 1) The conditions in which low-income people live are improved, and 2) Low-income people own a stake in their community. The Task Force Subcommittee on Scales and Ladders recommends the framework of the Community Scaling Tool as one way to quantify the results of individual agency efforts to affect changes in public policy, equity, civic capital, service and support systems, and economic opportunity. These two goals, these five dimensions, and the narrative descriptions of these categories were carefully crafted to accentuate the values the Community Action Network has held as the focus of its work for the last three decades.

The Community Scaling Tool is designed to allow local agencies to show the incremental progress that is made towards the achievement of long-term, complex goals. Parallel tools (see introductory table on page 4) can be used to measure the incremental changes families and agencies make in their efforts to achieve stability and become self-sufficient. Family and agency level scaling tools are not featured in this document. This paper is designed to help agencies identify when their work produces results at the community level, and then provide a framework for assessing, planning, measuring, and reassessing.

The framework described in this paper was developed through a collaborative effort of the members of the National Community Services Block Grant Monitoring and Assessment Task Force Committee on Scales and Ladders. The opinions expressed in this document are those of its authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Monitoring and Assessment Task Force or Office of Community Service, Department of Health and Human Services.