Evaluating a Movement: Using Systems Change Outcomes

Purpose: The Community Action to Fight Asthma Initiative is a comprehensive community initiative, which funds local, regional, and statewide coalitions and technical assistance providers to establish policies to reduce environmental risk factors that affect children where they live, learn, and play. Six years of data on outcomes of policy advocacy in housing, schools, and outdoor air are presented using systems change concepts to evaluate the building a synergistic movement.

The Evaluation included: Outcome measures for policy advocacy, collaboration among interdisciplinary partners and stakeholders, media usage, and policy maker surveys. The primary policy topics include: housing, schools, and outdoor air (and land use).

Policy and systems change concepts are discussed as they related to structural changes across multiple sectors of communities. These sectors include outcomes at the individual, family, organizational, interorganizational, policy, and systems levels. A typology of collaboration is presented that assesses success for each of the policy areas (housing, schools, and outdoor air) as well as cross pollination across multiple arenas. Examples of communities leveraging their resources to create sustainable policies are included to provide maximum accessibility to relevant lessons.

Conclusion: Employing outcome measures for policy and systems change work by focusing upon the types of policies and regulations established, the types of collaborative strategies that were and were not successful, the use of media messages used to support policies related to environmental risk factors for chronic conditions provides guidance and feedback to funders and grantees. These methods can maximize the successes for grantees involved in policy advocacy.