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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). More importantly, CFSC has developed a new planning and evaluation tool using our Whole Measures framework and adapting it to food security issues.

Whole Measures for Community Food Systems: Values-Based Planning and Evaluation, Jeanette Abi-Nader, Adrian Ayson, Keecha Harris, Hank Herrera, Darcel Eddins, Deb Habib, Jim Hanna, Chris Paterson, Karl Sutton, and Lydia Villanueva. September 2009, 40 pages.

This excellent document provides a lens for community food projects to dialogue about how their work affects whole communities. It includes a set of six core fields of value-based practices against which projects can measure the impact of their work. The core fields included in Whole Measures CFS are justice and fairness; strong communities, vibrant farms, healthy people, sustainable ecosystems, thriving local economies. Download PDF.