Task 3: Define the communities that are served by the organization.
Task 4: Decide how the organization expects to affect these communities.
The central issue in the whole evaluation process is to clearly define the organization's relationship to the community. This is complicated by Americans' loose use of the term community. To evaluate the social capital built, we need to first define the population served. This should be easy for most organizations to do, but the response to this query has implications for the whole evaluation planning and design process, so we want the clearest possible answer. Second, the organization must answer the harder question of how it expects to affect the community or communities served.
Roughly speaking, organizations define communities served in three overlapping ways.
First, they serve a community of place imprecisely defined by geographic boundaries. This may be a list of places from which customers or participants come, or may have been fixed historically. It may also vary quite dramatically in scale, ranging from a well-defined single neighborhood or town, to a number of neighborhoods, to whole cities or regions.
Second, an organization may have a central commitment to serving a community of identity, such as a racial, ethnic, or religious group. This commitment does not require or imply exclusion. The organization may serve a community of identity with shared cultural elements. By doing so, it can provide individual community member support or strengthen the whole community by either enabling it to act collectively or to preserve the community's distinctiveness.
Finally, an organization may be tied by its programs to distinct population groups defined by age or some other demographic category, service-need, vocation or avocation, and so on. For lack of a better term, we'll call this a program community. Members of such a group may or may not see themselves as members of a common community. For example, visually impaired or gay residents may see their primary community as being visually impaired or gay, or conversely may see this as a far less important community than their ethnic identity or their neighborhood. Law can also define a program community: for example, residence requirements that determine a school community.
These three types of communities (place, identity, and program) can combine in virtually every conceivable way, e.g., an organization may serve African-American teens from a certain neighborhood, and another organization may serve all adults across a whole city who lack job skills. Because of these overlapping communities, it is important for the organization to evaluate each type.
Ongoing example: what community does Jumpahead serve?
