How to assess the progress being made by your Bridges Initiative

The Boulder County Bridges Initiative in Colorado has a lot going for it: solid leadership and funding, an engaged community, and a professional support staff. They know how to manage a project and build a movement. Click here to view the tool they created to assess the progress of their Bridges work.

The Progress Assessment is based on the paper “Building Bridges Communities”. Think of it as a companion piece. Taking the nine steps for developing a Bridges Community and the key components of each step, planners can assess Steering Committee progress on a scale of: haven’t started, partially achieved, and achieved.

New and old Bridges Communities can use this assessment to:

Evaluate the Bridges Initiative as it is now
Refocus efforts
Identify missing components
Plan next steps
Celebrate progress

Bridges Communities are generating new approaches and tools all the time. Please share your ideas, knowledge, documents, instruments, models, and strategies with our community of practice by contacting me at communities@ahaprocess.com

Thank you, Boulder County Bridges Initiative.

Philip DeVol2020-06-26T16:40:09-05:00August 19th, 2009|Community|

About the Author: Philip DeVol

Phil DeVol is an international consultant who has been working with aha! Process since 1997. He used aha! Process concepts to make institutional changes at the addiction treatment center where he was the executive director for 19 years. During this time he also co-wrote Bridges Out of Poverty with Ruby Payne and Terie Dreussi-Smith. His book Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-by-World is being used to engage people in poverty in the work of building communities where everyone can live well. It worked so well that DeVol used it as a basis for a prison reentry model called Getting Ahead while Getting Out. He works with community leaders to help them move quickly from an attraction to application of Bridges concepts. Getting Ahead and Bridges are being used in hundreds of communities in the U.S., as well as a number of sites in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. His books have been translated into Spanish, Slovak, and Czech.