jdcPartnerships helped me better understand how to execute my role as a leader — in terms of communicating and evaluating the model, and supporting my staff with the tools they need to capture the most strategic outcomes that demonstrate the power of what we are doing.
— Kim Miyoshi, Executive Director, Oakland Kids First

Oakland Kids First:
How do we demonstrate
our impact?

The Challenge: Oakland Kids First knew they were making impact but needed a way to measure it and communicate it powerfully. Having spent ten years working on youth-led organizing for public education reform, OKF had developed a unique and nuanced approach to school improvement but were struggling with creating an evaluation framework to capture the full impact of their work. They felt pressured to get something in place as fast as possible to document the efficacy of their change model.

The Background: Oakland Kids First is a youth leadership development organization that improves outcomes for all students by organizing youth to change school culture and policy. Their Executive Director, Kim Miyoshi, in her role since 2000, knew the organization had successfully refined its programming, was achieving notable outcomes, and was in a position to help advance youth engagement as a strategy to transform public schools. Kim had taken advantage of many resources to develop her as a leader and to help move the organization’s work forward. Despite her efforts, the necessary pieces to bring everything together remained elusive.

Kim reports, “I have been at OKF for 11 years and worked with many supports and consultants. I had never found anyone who was able to understand the full breadth of what we were doing — who understood the complexity of doing youth leadership, organizing, and culture change — and could help me sort through it and organize it into a clear evaluation framework. jdcPartnerships was phenomenal.”

The Work: jdcPartnerships designed a process to develop the requested evaluation framework which included participation by the full staff throughout the engagement. However, not long into the process, both parties instinctively felt there was a disconnect — largely due to the organization’s inability to more clearly articulate the particular culture change strategies they were employing. Kim shares, “jdcPartnerships heard my concern. They took the time to really listen, understand the whole picture, and help me sort it all out. This really helped me develop deeper trust in our relationship.” The plan was modified and customized to address the stumbling blocks that arose.

jdcPartnerships then conducted a literature review of ‘youth engagement and culture change’ work in the field of education reform and drafted a logic model to ground Oakland Kids First’s work and help them to define how and which piece of the larger puzzle they were impacting in the short-term and long-term. “jdcPartnerships helped me understand how developed our Change Theory and Logic Model need to be and how to ground it in research so we’re not evaluating everything but only the things that we are actually doing that demonstrate the efficacy of our model, so we’re not overpromising.”

The Result: Kim explains the “jdcPartnerships team had a very deep understanding of our work and what makes us unique.” jdcPartnerships helped define OKFs’ approach, ground it in the literature, and create an evaluation structure to describe and quantify their impact. “The logic model and evaluation framework are like guideposts to capture what is so powerful about our program.”

Kim identifies 3 important results of her work with jdcPartnerships.

  1. The staff at Oakland Kids First are developing their evaluation capacity; and utilizing the framework provided, they are driving the rest of the evaluation process. “We have clear direction on where we are trying to go, what we’re trying to get to, and the evaluative tools needed to show we got there.”
  2. OKF is better able to communicate about the work they do. Oakland Kids First no longer leads with a multi-layered analysis of the problem. &lquo;We now have a way to tell our story that communicates solutions and evidence-based results.”
  3. Kim’s own leadership developed. “The work with jdcPartnerships helped me better understand how to execute my role as a leader — in terms of communicating and evaluating the model, and supporting my staff with the tools they need to capture the most strategic outcomes that demonstrate the power of what we are doing.”