The Wallace Foundation
Nancy Devine, Director of Communities Program and Dara Rose, Program Officer of Communities Program
The Wallace Foundation has invested in building up youth development service systems in five major cities; Boston, Chicago, New York City, Providence and Washington DC. Each city is at a different stage of development in system building and in particular in how they use technology to track data related to youth development services. For example, in Chicago, all OST providers that receive City funding and support are now tracking youth participation in an integrated citywide data tracking system. And in NYC approximately 800 city funded programs are connected to an integrated information management system which allows the city to track over 100,000 children. This ability to collect data consistently on such large numbers provides information which can be used to teach the public about the value of out-of-school time programming, to provide feedback to program managers which can guide their marketing and programming strategies and to hold each program and the city accountable for the outcomes. The Foundation believes that in order to support high quality programs it is fundamental to have a reliable information system that can unify communications between organizations and the institutions that support these programs.
In February 2008 Wallace published a brief entitled, “A Place to Grow and Learn: A Citywide Approach to Building and Sustaining Out-of-School Time Learning Opportunities” in which their approach is broken down into six action elements. The fourth element is “Reliable Information”. In the publication Wallace stresses that reliable information is “indispensable for planning” however most of the information institutions have relied on in the past is based on what we think we know or have heard. By funding efforts in these five cities to “identify neighborhoods’ needs, services and shortages” and create a citywide participation tracking system, Wallace hopes to see cities able to “gather attendance figures and related information into a single data base where participation in programs throughout entire cities can be monitored and assessed.”
As the five cities look to enhance or develop these unified systems, the institutions using these technological solutions are recognizing this as a helpful management tool. It is The Wallace Foundation’s hope that this effort will attract other forms of sustainable income as institutions recognize the value of having shared reliable data collected over time.
While the Foundation recognizes that there have been some challenges along the way such as lack of staff time to enter data, lack of computer skills, competing reporting requirements and different software capabilities they believe that “success in data gathering could eventually help answer important questions about the effectiveness of out-of-school time programming for both the city and the OST field in general.”