Chinatown Youth Initiatives
Discovering Identity through Exploration
Services
Insight Capture
Cognitive Mapping
Shared Measurement
Deliverables
CYI Impact Questionnaire
Self Discovery Questionnaire
Self Discovery Explorer
Media
"How Youth Community Groups Change Kids’ Lives, Visualized" Fast Company, November 12, 2021
How does a nonprofit serving underrepresented populations measure impact and build trust at the same time?
Chinatown Youth Initiatives (CYI) plays an important role in equipping New York City youth with knowledge and skills necessary to address the needs of Chinatown, Asian Americans, and other underrepresented communities. But the impact of community building programs like CYI isn't always easy to measure. Self-reported data is notoriously unreliable, and underrepresented communities can be reluctant to share data.
Students fill out the Self Discovery Questionnaire online.
Complex social dynamics at play in communities are largely invisible and often go under-valued in research and evaluation. We designed a member evaluation process for CYI members to be able to express in quantitative terms how CYI compares to other environments in their lives. We reveal the very immediate impact of CYI on the cognitive wellbeing of its members.
“A new way to quantitatively measure the beneficial effects of community building”
- Jess Leber, Fast Company
The emotional imprints of CYI and School represent their impact on CYI students.
We designed a privacy experience for the survey that created trust and transparency. CYI members were able to share and retrieve their answers without needing to attach personal details, and CYI was able to leverage the data for impact reporting in aggregate. Workshop participants were also able to see aggregate results while having the option to share personal results with peers, creating an safe forum for self-expression.
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