COO Evaluation

Unlike conventional evaluation approaches that can be top-down or perpetuate inequities, participatory evaluation brings stakeholders and evaluators together to collaboratively develop and implement the evaluation. In alignment with COO’s values of shared power and decision-making, a participatory approach ensures partners, governance group, and staff play an active role throughout the evaluation process.

We are grateful for the participation of the Evaluation Advisory Group members in the guidance of our evaluation work!

Phase 1 Evaluation

Unlike conventional evaluation approaches that can be top-down or perpetuate inequities, participatory evaluation brings stakeholders and evaluators together to collaboratively develop and implement the evaluation. In alignment with COO’s values of shared power and decision-making, a participatory approach ensures partners, governance group, and staff play an active role throughout the evaluation process.

This report summarizes evaluation findings from 2015 through 2021.

Findings revealed that COO’s long-term investments supported agencies, partnerships, and communities across the region to take meaningful actions to reduce inequities in the areas of housing, health, and economic opportunity. This report details the PSE changes made by COO partners, changes that can advance equity and improve the opportunities and lived experiences of communities in King County.

The evaluation also demonstrated how partners successfully leveraged COO resources and relationships to expand the reach and scope of their work. Further, COO’s investment in community power-building supported partners and communities to take aim at addressing root causes of inequities. COO partners mobilized communities, developed community leaders, and built community connections in ways that strengthened the foundation from which they could address the power imbalances that undergird structural inequities.

This report summarizes qualitative and quantitative evaluation findings from 2015 through 2021 to answer the following overarching evaluation question:

In what ways have COO’s cross-cutting strategies strengthened community connections and increased equity in housing, health and economic conditions?

Theory of Change

COO aims to increase racial, health, social, and economic equity by implementing three investment strategies: Community Partnerships, Systems and Policy Change, and the Learning Community. Through these investments, COO strives to increase the capacity of COO partners and communities to create policies, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes.

Community Power-Building Approach

To achieve COO’s mission, COO supports efforts to build community power, most often by investing in existing power in communities and supporting its growth. This is demonstrated by COO’s community-driven design, the governance of COO by community members, and its ongoing investments in building and strengthening existing power in communities.

Community power is the ability of communities most impacted by inequities to work together to set agendas, shift public discourse, increase opportunities for community ownership, and advance meaningful change.

Community power-building approaches seek to strengthen existing power in the communities that have been historically and systematically disempowered, increasing their capacity to shift power dynamics broadly in ways that increase equity.

COO Investment Strategies

COO supported a diverse group of new and existing partnerships and projects. COO provided funding and other resources so that partnerships could make new connections and leverage their COO work to secure additional funding, expanding the scope and sustainability of their work. Never intending to be a project’s sole funding source, COO sought to contribute to the confluence of regional resources and efforts to advance racial, social, and economic equity.

How Has COO Advanced Equity?

Community Power-Building

COO supported partners to strengthen existing power in communities. Partners found the longevity, level, and flexibility of COO’s funding helpful in building this power. Specifically, COO’s multi-year funding at a level high enough to hire staff and flexible enough to cover administrative costs and community power building activities.

COO, mostly through the Learning Community, provided opportunities for partners to expand their capacity and community connections to build power. Since 2018, COO partners developed 451 new partnerships, 1,119 new relationships, and 2,095 new leaders.

Housing

COO partners improved housing opportunities for King County residents by increasing access to affordable housing and minimizing displacement of residents, businesses, and cultural communities. COO partners produced PSE changes that increased tenant protections at the state and local level, funding for and development of affordable housing, and access to culturally responsive housing resources.

Leveraging Funds

COO partners leveraged COO resources and connections to expand the scope and sustainability of their work. They received tens of millions of additional funds to build and sustain the momentum for PSE change. This included funding efforts to develop and expand community development and landownership efforts, provide COVID relief and increase digital access, among others.

Community Development & Land Ownership

COO partners increased the involvement of community in developing and stewarding spaces in neighborhoods experiencing high levels of gentrification and displacement. Community Partnerships partners in the Central District, Rainier Valley, and White Center developed properties owned and designed by community.

COO partners across the investment strategies built community capacity and leadership for equitable land development and stewardship. The Learning Community provided many related resources and opportunities, including two Learning Circle cohorts and a Commercial Affordability Pilot.

Health

COO partners improved health opportunities in King County using several strategies, including by increasing access to healthy and culturally relevant foods in schools and communities. Partners also improved access to culturally responsive healthcare. Finally, partners improved community health and safety by making PSE changes related to climate action and police reform.

Economic Opportunities

COO partners improved economic opportunities by supporting small businesses and entrepreneurs, increasing worker and debt protections, expanding supports for low-income families, and providing workforce development opportunities, especially for immigrants, refugees, and young people of color.

Takeaways & Opportunities

Takeaways

Takeaway 1: Investing in community-driven work that spans multiple strategies and communities can support measurable benefits in equity.

Takeaway 2: Long-term investment in community power-building represents a compelling approach to supporting PSE change.

Takeaway 3: The Learning Community, COO’s investment strategy that supports organizations to build capacity and relationships, is an effective model for how funding agencies can support partners beyond providing financial resources.

Takeaway 4: COO supports future advancements in equity by contributing to changes to the regional funding landscape.

Conclusion

The evaluation examined COO’s effects on the lived experience of communities related to housing, health, economic opportunities, and community connections. It explored the changes in opportunities, policies, systems, and environmental conditions that resulted from COO’s investment in community power-building across its three strategies: Community Partnerships, Systems and Policy Change, and Learning Community.

The evaluation of COO activities from 2015 - 2021 demonstrated COO’s success in supporting community-driven advances in racial, social, and economic equity. The data illustrate ways that COO partners improved opportunities and lived experiences for many King County residents. The data also show how COO can continue to grow and build on these successes to expand its reach and impact for King County communities moving forward.

COO funders and leaders must also continue to expand the alignment of their internal processes and systems with racial equity principles. The success of an initiative focused on racial, economic, and social equity will necessarily be affected by the degree of equity with which it is administered and governed. Finally, the evaluation revealed that expanding and deepening the connections between COO partners and other funders represents a promising way to expand and deepen the work of COO itself. These lessons will inform the implementation and evaluation of COO as it moves into the next Best Starts for Kids levy funding cycle.

Communities of Opportunity (COO) and Best Starts for Kids

King County’s Best Starts for Kids builds on the strengths of families and communities so that babies are born healthy, children thrive and establish a strong foundation for life, and young people grow into happy, healthy adults. By investing in COO, Best Starts for Kids supports communities to create equitable conditions in housing, health, economic opportunity, and community connections so children and families can thrive.

COO in the 2022 Best Starts Annual Report

Advancing economic well-being by supporting BIPOC-owned small businesses

Advancing economic justice in communities creates a region where children, young people, and families are safe and thrive. Communities of Opportunity’s (COO) Commercial Affordability Pilot Project, which concluded in 2022, worked to address the ongoing exclusion of BIPOC individuals from equitable participation in the region’s economic life and the disparate impacts of King County’s unprecedented economic growth and rapid gentrification of neighborhoods in which BIPOC businesses have long served and been integral.

The Pilot Project focused on the financial and environmental barriers facing BIPOC-owned small businesses by building on existing projects within COO partner communities, promoting commercial affordability, identifying new tools to increase small business capital access, and finding ways to address technical assistance and other challenges.

The Commercial Affordability Pilot team, led by the National Development Council and its partners, Craft3, BDS Planning & Urban Design, and Moving Beyond, worked with a group of community advisors to support business owners who were at-risk of displacement from their neighborhoods through a real estate development program, a small business loan guarantee program, and technical assistance to owners. The Pilot Project leveraged over $3 million from COO’s investment of $925,000 to support 44 businesses/ organizations in securing long-term, stable locations and creating at least 109 new jobs while preserving 20 additional jobs. The Commercial Affordability Pilot team published a final report and set of recommendations to continue furthering policies, resources, and programming to ensure all communities can thrive equitably in King County.

Read the full community impact story and COO’s impact summary from the 2022 Best Starts for Kids annual report. Find the full Annual Report here.

2021

Community partnerships and power are essential.The 2021 Best Starts for Kids Annual Report featured that the COO virtual gathering of community leaders, activists, artists, organizers, storytellers, and experimenters, Meeting the Moment: Community Conversations on Healing, Organizing and Building the Future We Want.

The event highlighted innovative work and powerful organizing in communities across King County to support racial equity and well-being, centering three core values:

1. uplifting and sharing the work of COO partners,

2. addressing and dismantling anti-Blackness, as key to solidarity work and liberation, and

3. creating a community of belonging.

Over 230 attendees gathered together to hear about and learn from the work of COO partners and aligned community organizations, while engaging across projects, sectors and communities in strategic conversations about their own innovative strategies and approaches to creating greater equity, justice and wellbeing.

I think those are the values that we've taken to heart at Wa Na Wari and really [think] about. How does collective care, collective responsibility, collective creativity…how does that center in how we think about ownership? How we think about what we're doing? How do we think about our future, and how do we move forward with those values [that] really [define] us?”

— Inye Wokoma, Wa Na Wari, from the Meeting the Moment panel on Collective Ownership

As COO continues to center and collaborate with communities in King County for greater equity, well-being, and belonging, Meeting the Moment serves as a reminder of one seed planted. One seed that will continue to be supported and grow over time, shifting the world from what it is to what it should be, creating sustainable spaces for thinking big, connecting, organizing, and building together while deconstructing transactional ways of being.

2020

The Communities of Opportunity section of the 2020 Best Starts Annual Report begins on page 32 and features the work of the Food Innovation Network (FIN) and the Spice Bridge Food Hall in supporting immigrant and refugee food business entrepreneurs! In 2020, COO supported:

• 3,356 capacity building, community and workforce development events that brought communities together.

• 179,738 community members participated in partner events.

• 1,269 capacity building events focused on skill building workshops, leadership development and meetings to educate policy and decision-makers.

• 563 community members took on leadership positions within their communities.

• 141 new partnerships developed to support progress toward policy and/or systems change.

2019

In 2019, we were able to invest $5.55 million into King County communities in partnership with 110 community collaborators.

“Thanks to Communities of Opportunity, more adults are coming forward to be a part of the change that can be brought forth with the power of community. Being drawn in by the youth, they are taking on bigger roles in economic actions, idea creation and considering leverage points for systems change.”

—Latino Community Fund (fiscal sponsor to Comunidad Latina de Vashon)

The Communities of Opportunity section begins on page 24 of the 2019 Best Starts for Kids Annual Report.