Measuring Contributions of Joy: An In-the-Moment Logic Model

My roommate from my first year of college, with whom I haven't spoken in person since but who, I gather, now works with some sort of youth-serving nonprofit, recently crowdsourced the PR objectives of her fundraising department on Facebook:

If you were deciding to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program, what would you most want to know about the program or the agency providing the program?

The responses were the typical relatively ungrounded concepts: measurable results, effectiveness, impact, maximized efficiencies...

Having worked at a major granting institution focused on youth-serving programs, I figured I probably had some ideas to contribute. I prepared to ponder it for a couple minutes, as is my custom with serious FB surveys. I looked up from my computer and propped my head to one side, but by the time the comment box was open, I was off typing an idea I'd never heard before anywhere, and certainly not at WKKF.

Well, to be honest, I did manage to pull it around and relate it to their logic model (inputs, outputs, outcome). And, I think the initial inspiration came from the pictures the Foundation had hanging in their stairwell. But generally speaking, what I had to say was not the talk of bureaucracies. After all, she had asked what I would want to know, not what Kellogg would have wanted to know. But then again, I thought, they're probably the same.

What I would want to know, and what I think other people might consider wanting to know, is how much joy the youth add to society.

Too often we think of youth-serving programs as exactly that: youth-serving. We wise and well-researched adults serve the kids what is best for them, the aim being to make them into wise, well-researched, serving adults. But is that really what we want our communities to be about? Today's world, both youth and adult, is permeated with depression and loneliness. Too many kids grow up seeing themselves as a burden: expensive, distracting, and service-requiring.

It seems to me that what we really need is to let youth serve us. With their abundant energy, curious spirit, and fun-loving nature, I can't think of a demographic that could better help us slog through the day with a smile on our face. Really, it's such a perfect pairing, you'd almost think our species evolved with generational interdependencies as habit.

Okay, so, maybe my idea is completely obvious, but that doesn't make it bad.

So, in case you haven't gotten it yet, what I'm saying is that we should measure the value of youth programs by how much good they allow kids to do. It's good for the kids; makes them feel appreciated, which is absolutely imperative for them to grow up continuing to do good. And it's good for the rest of the world. Good is good.

To balance out the equation (don't want to get carried away with all the good), we subtract what the youth take out of the world: the inputs in the logic model. Namely, of interest to me in our current agricultural climate, is what they eat - hopefully sustainable harvests that add good jobs to the economy. Also, maybe I'd want to know what kind of space they consume. Do their buildings inspire awe or do they make parents want to run to the outskirts as blindly as freeways will let them?

Well, hmmm, maybe it's okay to get carried away with the good afterall. Or maybe it's just that when we don't have to look so far into the future to find it, we make sure that that which we take from the world gives back. Win-win, they call it, and, no, I don't think it's too optimistic a thing to aspire to. Unfortunately, future-looking assessment systems that focus on one subject over a process don't even have a mechanism for measuring themselves against that aspiration.

The older I get, the more I think the idea that we should be enduring hardship for the future is fundamentally flawed. I don't have near the philosophical chops to explain it, but I think we want to be adding more in-the-now analyses of value, and it seems to me the most clear-cut place to start with that is recognizing that youth have something to give, now, as youth; it's pretty darn hard to argue with the fact that youthfulness is too great a thing to keep locked away in receipt of service.

We need to start demanding that nonprofits measure their value to society as a whole, in terms of joy, in the now. The way the math works out, the amount by which their youth are actively making the world a happier place is going to factor into that calculus significantly. And for the time being, as long as I, misguidedly, I suppose, have a chunk of happiness stored away in some cold, hard cash, that calculus is going to be what I approximate when I decide "to fund or not to fund a youth-serving program."