Prior to joining ImpactED, I spent five years working at direct service nonprofits. Most recently, I helped thousands of New York City public school families access their free NYC Scholarship Account, witnessing both the power of democratizing access to investment accounts and the challenges involved in building trust in a groundbreaking program. Observing successes and shortcomings in program implementation led me to seek out opportunities to improve my program evaluation abilities. I joined ImpactED as a Fellow to do just that.
Who Is love.fútbol?
As a Fellow with ImpactED, I was most excited to work with love.fútbol, a nonprofit working on a global scale that has recently taken on projects in Philadelphia. Their work centers around efforts to create, reclaim, and redefine sports spaces (particularly soccer fields) as inclusive centers of community and lasting platforms for social growth. love.fútbol is able to succeed in distinct communities across the world due to their model of partnering with local landowners (for example, the School District of Philadelphia) to identify spaces in need of renovation and nonprofits (such as Kensington Soccer Club and Street Soccer) to provide programming at the renovated spaces. Their work in Philadelphia is timely both from a visibility perspective, given that the city will host six World Cup games this summer, and because the city sorely lacks safe and modern parks, rec centers, and schoolyards where communities can come together to play sports.
Using Evaluation Methods to Understand Community Engagement Approaches
My work supporting love.fútbol centered around collecting and analyzing data from two sources, surveys and interviews, to share findings that will help love.fútbol better understand the perspectives community members and partners have of their projects. I assisted with the design and translation of surveys created to gather data from community members who have used a sports space both before and after love.fútbol’s renovation. In addition, I analyzed interviews with some of love.fútbol’s partner organizations in Philadelphia and generated themes, key quotes, and insights for the love.fútbol team.
To analyze how love.fútbol collaborates and engages with the community, we used The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership. This tool aided us in contextualizing and analyzing the various ways in which love.fútbol engages and collaborates with different communities and partners in the many places they work across the globe. It informed my creation of themes and takeaways from partner interviews by helping me systematically categorize love.fútbol’s current approach to community engagement with different groups and organizations in Philadelphia, understanding that there is no uniform, “correct” approach to engagement. Our findings enabled love.fútbol to view their methods of community engagement in Philadelphia through a clear framework and provided them with a system and baseline data they can utilize moving forward.
Leveraging Data to Learn and Grow
Through contributing to this project, I observed the importance of having a flexible model that can shift across contexts and witnessed the realities of conducting evaluation work with an innovative, fast-paced organization. love.fútbol operates on a global scale, with over 100 projects in 17 countries. As a result, they have become adept at tailoring their model of community engagement and partnership to achieve the best results for any given community.
By learning from the data we gathered and using the tools we created, love.fútbol will be able to better serve communities in Philadelphia and across the globe going forward. love.fútbol will leverage the surveys and interview protocol we designed to better understand the community landscape and will revisit their theory of change and community engagement approach to further their impact. Speaking about her work with ImpactED, Adele Bruggeman, love.fútbol’s Director of Strategy, Inclusive Innovation & Impact, said:
“Data is the bridge between community voice and sustainable change. This collaboration has empowered love.fútbol to move beyond traditional project cycles, leveraging a more nuanced understanding of stakeholder dynamics to create sports spaces that are truly owned and sustained by the neighborhoods they serve.”
In her reflection on our partnership, Adele highlights the value of program evaluation work as a powerful tool to better understand a program’s impact and inform changes to its design. I’m proud to have played a part in ImpactED’s work helping love.fútbol on this journey.
