Measuring Health Outcomes: Success Measures Evaluation Tools for Community Development and Health

Across the United States, affordable housing and community development practitioners have come to recognize the important links between their programs and the health of the people and communities they serve. Projects and partnerships that integrate affordable housing, community development and health have begun to scale as critical approaches for addressing health disparities. However, evaluating and documenting the connections between the fields has been an ongoing challenge. Until recently, community-based organizations have not had the measurement tools to track and assess health outcomes – revealing a significant gap in their ability to better understand their contributions to healthy communities and to obtain the evidence needed to effectively improve, tailor and target programs and interventions.