Since 1999, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation has focused on increasing the number of low-income youth served by programs with scientifically proven or persuasive evidence showing that they help youth lead healthy, productive lives. To accomplish this, the Foundation has devoted the bulk of its resources to strengthening a select group of organizations, helping them to serve more young people, achieve greater organizational effectiveness, and, ultimately, become models and leaders in youth development.

The reports in this section, along with our 2007 annual report, continues our commitment to reporting publicly on the performance of the Foundation and its grantees in meeting the objectives we have set for ourselves. We will provide regular updates on the measures we use to evaluate performance on our website (and in future annual reports) to ensure the most current information is available.

We have found that developing and implementing these measures, though difficult and time- consuming, is essential to accomplishing our and our grantees’ missions. Such reporting is not a familiar practice in the nonprofit world, even among the strongest organizations. However, we believe that setting clear performance objectives and establishing credible reporting systems to assess progress provide us and our grantees with an impetus to continue to improve our performance. As you will see in the pages that follow, our measurement tools and data collection are still being developed and refined.

We understand there is no reliable methodology for ascribing with precision the success or failure in meeting objectives directly tied to the Foundation’s investments and extra-financial support. Our grantees are effective and well-regarded organizations, with strong leaders and a broad base of supporters, and these factors in themselves increase their odds for success. Nonetheless, we believe that our strategy can complement the grants from other funders and strengthen the grantees’ work.