Policy & Practice | April 2021

For human services CBOs to be best positioned to achieve breakthrough results, the public sector and philan thropy must recognize and invest in CBO capacity to measure and collec tively advance toward outcomes. The National Imperative: Joining Forces to Strengthen Human Services 4 report highlighted specific ways the ecosystem can move to become more oriented toward outcomes, which requires a fun damental shift in the way we quantify the value of our work and measure our impact. The evidence and insight gained from this shift in measurement is not only crucial to demonstrating the value of human services on the local level, but can be instrumental in spreading and scaling breakthrough results through the influence of public policy at the local, state, and federal levels. Changing the measurement frame work to get the whole picture To understand our progress in impacting outcomes, we must examine the strengths and gaps that exist in com munities, defining the indicators that help quantify our “where we are” and “where we want to go” along a theory of impact. The priority and impact of each factor must also be assessed and consistently monitored for impact to determine where to emphasize focus. TheWell Being in the Nation (WIN) Measurement Framework 5 offers a set of commonmeasures to assess and improve population and community health and well-being across sectors. The 2Gen Outcomes Bank 6 fromAscend at the Aspen Institute also provides a set of key areas and corresponding indicators, sup ported by research to be crucial toward sustaining social and economic mobility. To meet community needs, orga nizations need to understand the underlying issues affecting their com munities. Neglecting to do so will result in solutions that address symptoms but not root causes. Tools such as a Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) 7 can provide data for CBOs to use in co-creating comprehensive solutions to community challenges. For example, a CHNA can show which Co-creating with community through community health needs assessments

Health and Human Services Must Partner with Each Other Currently, our health care system focuses more on disease management instead of disease prevention. This is because of the way health care is incentivized for payment in the United States. However, the emphasis and resources we put into clinical care or “disease management” only make up 10 percent 3 of the total contribution to health. Behavioral factors (30%), social and economic factors (40%), and physical environment (10%) combined play a greater role. The impact human services can have on these factors is significant, as more than 70 percent of the factors that influence health are outside of the clinical context. The long-standing systemic inequi ties illuminated by COVID-19, along with the growing evidence and under standing that health extends beyond clinical care to include the social determinants, underscores the urgency for health care and human services to partner more deeply with one another to move to a preventive system that focuses on upstream solutions. Equal investment in both health care and human services must be made to strengthen their capacity to innovate and truly measure outcomes.

About This Series

This is the fourth in a series of six

zip codes experience higher rates of child abuse, and also show other SDOH issues in those zip codes that may be associated with child abuse, such as teen pregnancy, lower number of high school graduations, or lack of employ ment due to no or low job skills. This, in turn, can point the way toward programs that offer family strength ening assets in those specific areas. Today, Family Services San Antonio utilizes its own assessment tool, informed by its local CHNA. This tool helps create preventive measures to com munity challenges andmeasures impact based on what the CHNA has set as local health priorities. By implementing this practice, Family Services has strengthened its programs, increased its partnerships with health care, and built a case of support for funding partners. Generative Partnerships ; and Essay 3, Why Regulatory Modernization Is Essential to a Nimble and Adaptive Human Services System , are available in the August and December 2020 issues and February 2021 issue, respectively. essays focusing on the adaptive and disruptive challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic brings and the steps we can take as a nation to rethink our systems in the wake of this crisis. The goal of the series is to serve as a call to action and roadmap for leaders in government, health and human services, and the philanthropic sector to address the challenges our nation faces and move toward a system that will respond not only to this challenge but the ones to come. Essay 1, How the COVID-19 Pandemic Can Lead toWidespread Changes in Our Health and Human Services Systems; Essay 2, Achieving High Impact in Health and Human Services: The Importance of

Michelle Hinton serves as the Director of Impact, Population Health, andWell-Being at the Alliance for Strong Families and Communities

R. Bryan Grove was a former Organizational Effectiveness Consultant at the American Public Human Services Association.

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