photo credit, Library of Congress, via Flickr Commons
Social workers, especially us “macro” types, use a lot of pretty fuzzy language sometimes. What does “empowerment” really mean after all? How do we know effective advocacy when we see it?
And what, really, is “civic engagement”, and how in the world do we measure that?
Answering this question is important not just because it’s never a good idea to spend energy talking about something without really having any idea what we’re actually talking about, but also because defining and measuring and evaluating our civic engagement work is about accountability and integrity, which, after all, are some of the goals towards which our civic engagement work is focused in the first place.
We know that civic engagement is far more than getting people registered to vote, or even than getting them to the polls. I remember a course that I took from Ernesto Cortes, of the Industrial Areas Foundation, in graduate school, and how he talked about how reducing civic engagement, and the exercise of our citizenship, to voting alone, really makes it essentially another aspect of consumerism–choosing between this or that preformulated option, which, of course, isn’t very engaging at all.
But the other stuff, beyond voting, is even harder to measure and truly conceptualize: what does it look like to be authentically involved in the governance of one’s own community, or one’s own life, and how do we begin to track and evaluate that engagement on a broad scale?
The folks at the Building Movement Project (I know, I know—I’m a bit obsessed) have a new paper, Evidence of Change, which discusses evaluating civic engagement efforts and, I believe, offers, if not a roadmap, at least some sparks of guidance for organizations trying to be clear about their goals in this client empowerment work and, ultimately, demonstrate its tangible value.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because I really believe that there are particular opportunities for advancement of advocacy and civic engagement as legitimate activities, and, really, core strategies, of social service nonprofit organizations, but we’ll never solidify a place for them if we can’t figure out how to assess and communicate about what we’re doing, and why it matters.
Some of the new insights for me from this, most recent, discussion:
So getting out the vote among our clients and allies is obviously important. And being able to quantify the electoral impact of our work, and how it changes conversations about the issues we care about, is important in garnering the resources we’ll need to support its continuation. Absolutely.
But we want more for those we have the honor to serve than a choice between candidate A and candidate B. We want them to be more than consumers–we see them and know them as stakeholders, capable of helping to build the kind of society we want for all of us.
And that takes the kind of civic engagement that moves mountains.
So we’d better be ready to measure how far they’ve come.
