Building a system to evaluate a 10-year community investment
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How do you measure the impacts of investments spanning ten years, dozens of partners and initiatives, and multiple communities? Learn how Providence CORE is helping build a measurement and evaluation system for a wide-ranging, 10-year economic mobility-focused investment strategy in California's Silicon Valley.
The Silicon Valley region of California faces extreme income inequality, rising costs, and stagnant job growth. Sobrato Philanthropies' 10-year philanthropic investment known as Thriving Communities (TC, formerly Silicon Valley Program) is taking on some of those challenges, with a focus on economic mobility. Through TC, Sobrato awarded more than $30.4 million in grants in 2024 alone.
Our team at the Providence Center for Outcomes Research & Education (CORE) is proudly helping TC build a framework to measure the impacts of its wide-ranging strategies. That’s no small task, given the ripple effects from an effort spanning so many communities, partnerships, and programs.
This post offers a brief overview of how CORE is addressing this challenge. To learn more about TC, visit Sobrato Philanthropies’ website.
Building the foundation
As a TC evaluation partner, CORE aims to bring clarity to its data collection and analysis planning and set the program up for long-term learning and evaluation success. This work is also supported by Learning for Action and Mosaic America.
While CORE works with organizations wherever they are on their data journey, the opportunity to help build TC’s “participatory measurement, evaluation, and learning” (PMEL) system from the ground up is particularly exciting.
“Our work today will help TC and its partners evaluate their strategies’ impact and guide any needed course corrections for years to come” - CORE Research Scientist Monique Gill
Measuring what matters
A first step in developing the PMEL plan was defining a set of learning questions that reflect TC’s goals.
For example, one of TC’s learning questions is “To what extent is TC achieving desired outcomes? Specifically, that people at the center of the TC strategy—low-wage, housing insecure, and excluded populations—experience increases in economic advancement, power and autonomy, and being valued in the community.”
But how can we measure broad outcomes like economic advancement or community belonging? To do this, CORE helped map each question to specific outcomes and new or existing data sources that speak to those outcomes. Examples of the data TC will use include:
● Existing external data (e.g., American Community Survey)
● Program data generated by TC (e.g., information on investments and staff activities)
● New data collected from grantees (e.g., data on their capacity, partnerships)
● New data collected from community members (e.g., data on community perceptions, assets, stories)
Bringing it all together
CORE’s approach to the question above illustrates how different data sources can be used to measure impact.
For example, to track economic advancement, the partners plan to layer publicly available household income data from the American Community Survey with the University of Washington Self-Sufficiency Standard. The UW Standard measures the real cost of living for working families. This empowers TC to view population-level changes in income and see if households are earning enough to meet basic needs.
Similarly, CORE is helping TC explore ways to track the capacity of local grantees that support residents “being valued in the community.” Surveys with grantees are one method TC anticipates using to view how its investments affect these organizations and networks’ capacity over time.
These are just a few examples of how CORE is helping build a strong foundation for studying and learning from TC. The team anticipates finalizing the measurement and analysis plan in early 2026. Soon after, CORE will begin gathering, managing and reporting on this data in collaboration with the TC team and other PMEL partners.
To learn more about TC, visit Sobrato Philanthropies’ website.
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