How do we know it's working? : a community developing organisation tries to demonstrate it is making a major social impact.

Abstract

Violence Free Waitakere (VFW) is a small New Zealand based community development organisation which for 16 years has been running events and campaigns designed to prevent violence and increase community capacity and resilience.

VFW has an expenditure of nearly $500,000 a year almost all of which comes from very short term funding sources (1 year cycles). A particular focus of the work is to produce templates of projects that would enable other communities in New Zealand to run their own variations of these projects. Creating model projects and testing them out takes much more than a year and particularly what takes the time is to show that not only do people like to engage with our projects and take information away which they later may use, but that the ripples of the projects actually create a shift in practice in the community.

Evaluating the impact of projects on a community is a challenging and potentially expensive task for a small community organisation and this paper looks at the trajectory of three major project areas from conception to promotion into other communities