Progress Toward Flourishing
Measuring meaningful change in people's lives.
Measuring Meaningful Change
Programs are often evaluated by asking whether participants reached a particular outcome: Did they obtain housing? Find employment? Complete a program? Access health care? Remain out of prison?
These outcomes matter. But they rarely tell the whole story of how a person's life is changing.
Someone may still be experiencing housing instability while building relationships, improving physical or mental well-being, developing a stronger sense of purpose, connecting with a supportive community, or gaining greater confidence in navigating daily life.
Those changes matter too.
Progress Toward Flourishing is an evaluation framework for understanding and measuring meaningful movement in people’s lives, including changes that may occur before, alongside, or beyond traditional program outcomes.
Why Progress Matters
Flourishing should not be treated as a simple endpoint that someone either reaches or doesn't.
For people experiencing poverty, homelessness, incarceration, reentry, trauma, health challenges, or other complex circumstances, change is rarely linear. Progress may occur in one area of life while significant challenges remain in another.
That is why the framework focuses on movement toward flourishing.
Instead of asking only:
- Did the program achieve its intended outcome?
we can also ask:
- What is changing in people’s lives?
- Where are people making progress?
- Where are significant barriers still present?
- How might the program be contributing to that movement?
These questions create a more complete picture of impact without minimizing the importance of concrete outcomes such as housing, employment, health-care access, education, or reduced justice-system involvement.
Flourishing is Multidimensional
Human flourishing involves more than meeting material needs.
Depending on the population and program, meaningful change may involve dimensions such as:
- Well-being
Physical and emotional health, hope, life satisfaction, and a sense that life is improving.
- Purpose & Agency
A sense of direction, the ability to make meaningful choices, confidence, and belief in one’s capacity to influence what happens next.
- Relationships & Social Connection
Supportive family relationships, friendships, belonging, trust, and connection to people who care.
- Material Stability
Housing, food, safety, employment, financial stability, transportation, and other resources needed for daily life.
- Health & Access to Care
Access to appropriate health care and the ability to navigate systems and obtain needed services.
- Community & Contribution
Participation, belonging, helping others, and opportunities to contribute meaningfully to a community.
- Faith & Spiritual Life
For programs and populations where it is relevant, spiritual well-being, meaning, faith, and connection to a faith community.
These are examples, not a prescribed checklist.
The dimensions of flourishing should emerge from the program's mission, the population being served, existing research, and the experiences and priorities of the people closest to the work.
A Context-Specific Approach
Progress Toward Flourishing is not a standardized instrument that imposes the same definition of flourishing on every organization or population.
The process begins by asking:
What does flourishing mean here?
What changes does the organization hope to contribute to? What does research tell us about the population and context? What do practitioners observe? And what do participants themselves describe as meaningful change?
What would progress look like?
We identify the dimensions and indicators that could demonstrate meaningful movement, including intermediate changes that may precede longer-term outcomes.
How will we know?
We select or develop appropriate measures, drawing from validated instruments when possible and adapting methods to the population and setting. We can combine quantitative measures with interviews, focus groups, observations, administrative data, and participant narratives.
The result is an evaluation framework grounded in both evidence and context.
Beyond a Single Measure of Success
A person’s life cannot always be captured by a single outcome.
A participant might obtain housing but remain socially isolated and without a sense of purpose.
Another person might still be unhoused while establishing primary health care, reconnecting with family, developing supportive friendships, addressing substance use, and beginning to envision a different future.
Traditional outcome measures may identify the first person as a success and the second as someone who has not yet achieved the desired outcome.
A flourishing-centered evaluation allows us to see both more clearly.
It does not replace concrete program outcomes.
It places those outcomes within the larger context of a human life.
Measuring Without Losing the Story
Numbers help us identify patterns. Stories help us understand what those patterns mean.
For that reason, Progress Toward Flourishing is particularly well suited to mixed-methods evaluation.
Surveys and administrative data can show whether patterns of change are occurring across participants or over time. Interviews, observations, and participant narratives can help explain how change happens, what participants experience as meaningful, and what barriers remain.
Together, these forms of evidence can answer not simply whether something changed, but also what changed, for whom, under what circumstances, and why it matters.
What Organizations Can Learn
A Progress Toward Flourishing evaluation can help an organization understand:
- where participants are experiencing meaningful change;
- where progress appears limited, or barriers remain;
- whether the outcomes being measured reflect what participants actually experience;
- how different dimensions of life may be connected;
- what aspects of a program may be contributing to change;
- where program design or implementation could be strengthened; and
- how to communicate impact more fully to funders, boards, partners, and communities.
The purpose is not simply to produce another evaluation report.
The purpose is to generate evidence that helps organizations learn, improve, and better understand the human change they exist to support.
Build an evaluation framework that captures the change that matters most.
Progress Toward Flourishing in Your Organization
Organizations can incorporate the Progress Toward Flourishing framework into a new evaluation or use it to strengthen an existing outcome measurement system.
The process may include defining meaningful dimensions of flourishing, developing an evaluation framework, selecting or creating measures, designing surveys and interview protocols, collecting and analyzing data, and translating findings into practical recommendations and credible evidence of impact.
The central question remains simple:
What are we helping people toward?
And how will we know whether they are making progress?
Schedule a 15-minute introductory call to talk about what Progress Toward Flourishing could look like in your organization.
