Project Impact is Catalyst for Deeper Impact

Neighborhood House comes out of the settlement movement of the 1880s-1920s whose goal was to create a better connection between the rich and the poor of society. A main strategy of the movement was the creation of “settlement houses” in poor, urban areas, with middle-class volunteers and which offered social services such as daycare, education, and healthcare. Founded in 1905, Neighborhood House continues to deliver innovative and life-changing programs for low-income people of all ages.

Before participating in the SVP-sponsored Project Impact in 2015, Neighborhood House was an SVP Investee a decade ago in 2006. That partnership focused on their Childcare Improvement Project, which works with family childcare providers. The program provides training and technical assistance to improve the profitability and sustainability of childcare businesses, as well as improve the quality of care they provide for children and families. SVP partnered with Neighborhood House leadership to help market the program to childcare providers in the community, and to help childcare providers market their own programs.

Neighborhood House’s next deep dive with SVP was their participation in Project Impact, a workshop series to help nonprofits measure and improve their community impact. Rick Nitti, Neighborhood House Executive Director, is on the Board of the Nonprofit Association of Oregon and had heard how valuable Project Impact was for many local nonprofits, so he was eager to have his own organization get involved. Initially, he wanted the program’s learnings to impact the whole organization at once. He quickly realized that he and his participating staff and volunteers would have to pair it down to a single program in order to make the deep and lasting impact they were looking for, and then scale it across their other programs. They chose to focus solely on their Parenting Program, which provides culturally and developmentally appropriate services to immigrants and refugee families.

Project Impact taught Neighborhood House the knowledge and skills to examine the program, evaluate its strengths and weaknesses, and make appropriate adjustments to improve it. They found that while their Parenting Program was eliciting very high satisfaction levels from participants, the program wasn’t serving the family fully because there weren’t meaningful services reaching the dads. After this evaluation, they successfully strengthened the program so that it would reach the family more holistically, thereby better equipping the organization as a whole to fulfill its mission. “We came out of Project Impact with skills that we will carry forward and use with our other programs,” says Rick,“it helped us develop capacity that we didn’t have before.”