Measure & Monitor Success

Impact Team Agenda

With a focus on youth violence prevention and promoting youth and family resilience, measure the success and utilize data to inform resource allocation decisions and strategy, in alignment with CDC framework and associated risk and protective factors.

  • Determine which risk and protective factors we wish to track as part of this work based on the research of the CDC and WHO

  • Establish legal data sharing agreements and technical data transfer processes to pull all the desired information into one data warehouse 

  • Articulate how we want to calculate / display data in order to inform decision making without stigmatizing any communities

  • Create the corresponding data dashboards and reports

  • Identify processes that would benefit from using this data, including resource allocation, success measurement, and strategic planning, and then work with the owners of those processes to incorporate this resource into their design.

  • Iterate and refine the resource over time in response to stakeholder feedback, provide ongoing training to ensure usage

Note: whereas the Program Quality & Access impact team focuses on understanding the effectiveness of specific programs in achieving their goals, this impact team is focused on evaluating the overall success of our efforts citywide - looking at the outcomes for youth and families. We recognize that in an ideal world, we would be able to directly tie programmatic work to our desired outcomes, but this will take longitudinal research studies that require several years, if not decades of data. Our coalition has therefore landed on this two-pronged approach to evaluating success.

Current Focus

Our goal for the 2025-26 school year is to get as many schools as possible to participate in the Healthy Kids Colorado survey and work through the legality of being able to share appropriately aggregated forms of this data with coalition members and other stakeholders in the Denver community to help drive their decision making. An analysis shows that the questions in this survey will allow us to track more than 80% of the risk and protective factors identified by the CDC, allowing us to utilize this single data source to inform citywide efforts.

Over subsequent years, we can then focus on other data sources and data collection methods to cover the remaining less than 20%, potentially utilizing the instruments developed by the BEST Initiative - a state project with similar goals.

Our Journey

You may find running notes from impact team meetings on this topic here.