A city initiative to improve the quality of life for urban youth: how evaluation contributed to effective social programming

Seeking a way to improve the quality of life for urban youth, one community passed a special initiative that set goals for funded service activities to accomplish and required a comprehensive evaluation of the effects services had. Organizations seeking funding were required to respond to annual requests for proposals and obtain approval for their service plan. A performance logic model was developed to guide the collection and reporting of evaluation data from grantees, as well as track community-wide indicators of quality of life for youth. Other key features of this comprehensive evaluation included the development of a performance index summarizing overall performance excellence and the utilization of a post hoc measure of change due to service productivity.