New Measures of Success

Integral to whole thinking is the idea that we are what we measure. If we continue to measure the success of our projects in narrow or specialized terms, we risk failing to broaden our vision to address the whole community in our work. How can our work respond to and reflect the broader values of our communities? How can it address inequities in the present and provide a long-term vision for the future? These resources help us to think about our work in these broad terms.

Resources

Our own efforts to reframe how we measure success and how we might look at our work much more holistically have resulted in our tool Whole Measures (formerly Measures of Health). This online tool is the first ethically-based, community-oriented standard on why and for whom land is restored and conserved.

The Trust for Public Land has designed their own version of Whole Measures, called the Mission Matrix, to guide their conservation projects and help them assess whether to take on a project, how to approach it, and how they could have done it better. See PDF

The Community Food Security Coalition has developed principles to help urban areas guide their urban planning to ensure that all their residents have access to healthy food. Find a good overview of these principles in their spring 2007 newsletter (see PDF). The Land Use and Health project of the Public Health Institute also offers toolkits to aid with this model of planning.