Ethnic Community Self-Help: The Challenge of Measuring Outcomes

 
 
ISED Solutions' Somali Bantu Community Development Project is funded by the Office of Refugee Resettlement's Ethnic Community Self-Help Program.  The Ethnic Community Self-Help Program sets as its objective to support ethnic community based organizations (ECBOs) in providing refugee populations with critical services to assist them in becoming integrated members of American society.
 
The Somali Bantu Community Development Project builds community-level capacity in select Somali Bantu communities to help them deliver meaningful self-help social service assistance.  This year we've facilitated the creation of four ECBOs, each with the organizational structure to provide bridging case management services.  All four communities are now delivering these services and managing cases from professional client case files.  (See the picture of Mohammed assisting a client this past weekend in Buffalo, above, and Sidi reviewing his case notes earlier today in Utica, below.)
 
I have written before about our use of Client Contact and Client Intake Forms.  All four communities use these and gather valuable data on client demographics, needs, and referrals for social services.  The Office of Refugee Resettlement rightly places an importance on SMART project outcomes, and these can be challenging for nascent ECBOs to define and measure.  ISED Solutions is currently determining the most streamlined / easily adaptable processes and indicators for measuring the impact of bridging case management services at ECBOs. Check back on our project blog for updates on methods as we test them with these new Somali Bantu organizations!