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Deborah Johnson illustrates how storytelling can help unearth powerful impacts. She shares two case studies from the Boys and Girls Club.

As an external contractor evaluating the Jeffrey A. Cowan Boys and Girls Club in inner city Long Beach, California, I struggled to find statistical significance in traditional outcomes such as academic improvement or having a consistent relationship with a caring adult. After three years, survey and other data produced few consistent results. The poorly defined curriculum and high transiency rate didn’t help. Of the 150 students assessed each year, only 26 provided three consecutive surveys.

Fortunately, I moved beyond the statistics and into families’ homes with annual visits to five children and their mothers. All were extremely poor. Only one spoke English. They survived on welfare and odd jobs. Most had strung out the goodness of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles as long as they could. They survived day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, with no hope that things would change.

But things did change. And they changed for the better in four of the five families. The stories of two of those families follow.

Case Study 1 – March 2000
JH sprawls on a bed beneath a light blanket, staring at the small television teetering on a small stand. The bed dominates the closet-sized room. In a cabinet beneath the only window, open boxes of crackers and cereal rest next to a six-pack of juice. Light spills through a half-open door, revealing bathroom bottles, towels, clutter. Outside drunken neighbors yell at each other. She and her mother have been living in the motel for four months.

“We don’t have a refrigerator so I buy cold food and milk every day. I have to sleep on the floor because she won’t sleep next to me. Last weekend I went to a friend’s house to cook a turkey they’d given us at the Boys and Girls Club,” her mother tells me.

Case Study 1 – Two Years Later
If I saw her walking down the street, I wouldn’t recognize her. Two years ago, she was smaller and quieter. Now when she opens the screen door, she is tall, thin, with long, stylized hair and silver bracelets glittering on both wrists. When we meet, a shadow of the old withdrawn self briefly crosses her face. But it disappears quickly.

In a living room in one of Long Beach’s better neighborhoods, JH sits comfortably in a La-Z-Boy chair surrounded by exercise equipment and books. In the next room, her foster mother folds clothes. A Chihuahua cuddles next to JH. For more than an hour, JH talks. She tells me about school, her part-time job, her love for Harry Potter books. A good student, JH has a lightness in her voice. She doesn’t skirt painful memories. She seems much more open about who she is, how she feels, and what she needs.

Case Study 2 – April 2001
The door of the low-ceilinged, two-bedroom apartment opens to a concrete courtyard. Inside people large and small jostle in the kitchen. Covering almost very inch of the wall are clowns. “Are you a collector?” I ask.

Of her six children and five grandchildren, five live with RM. A large woman, RM dropped out of school in eleventh grade. Today she’s on welfare. Her car gave out a year ago. She relies on family and friends to take her places. I ask how many friends she has. “The apartment manager and her daughter,” she replies. Her brother takes her to the grocery store once a month. She doesn’t want to work so she can watch her children. “My kids don’t go out and play,” she says. “If I can’t see them, I can’t trust what they’re doing.” Three of the children belong to the Boys and Girls Club. She likes it because “there’s somebody watching them.”

Case Study 2 – A Year and a Half Later
When she comes to the door, it is obvious RM has undergone a major transformation. Her eyes sparkle; she is active and interested. At a friend’s urging, she has taken a job as a home health care aide for an elderly friend. She works five mornings a week. She likes the job so much she has just joined the home workers union. Her mother died and with a small legacy, she fixed up the apartment and bought a car. Her doctor changed her diabetes medication and she has more energy. She has been to parenting classes and learned how to discipline her children. She says that she no longer wants to worry about things she can’t control. She feels as if she has her own life now.

Listening to the families’ stories taught me to look more deeply at the Club’s impact. I asked, “Why did families bring their children here in the first place?” From more than a decade of working with community-based organizations, I knew that one reason was the Club’s recruitment strategy. Several times a year, staff members walked door to door through the neighborhood, talking to any parent they could find. Parents also liked the fact that the staff belonged to the same cultural, ethnic, and economic backgrounds as they did. And the Club provided a tremendous service—essentially free childcare ($20 a year) until 8pm five days a week for families struggling on minimal paychecks.

In our first interviews, most of the mothers described their lives as quite isolated: children came home quickly, doors were locked early in the evening, and television sets were on constantly. But when a child joined the Club, a crack in the isolation developed. It may have been small—only a few hours several days a week—but it represented something much larger. How the families functioned, whom they talked to, and what they trusted changed. Resistance to outsiders diminished. And the next time a friend urged a woman to take a job or a social worker recommended a parenting class, the advice was heard, not dismissed. As one mother said, “Through the Boys and Girls Club, we got a taste of freedom. That just carried on and a lot of things came into our life.”

In designing the evaluation, I followed the literature and mapped out a path I thought reasonable. On reflection however, individual outcomes probably were not the most appropriate level of analysis. A better yardstick may have been a social network study asking questions such as: how did family conversations change after children joined the Club and how were internal and external family dynamics influenced?

Unlike linear indicators such as academic improvement, stories are a dance. They bob, weave, and move up and down. For most of the families interviewed, the stories had dramatic, unpredictable endings, especially given the poverty of their circumstances. But they indicate that even apparently ineffectual programs can have powerful impacts. You just have to know where to look.

Deborah Johnson, Ph.D.
Independent Consultant
P.O. Box 867
Silverado, CA 92676
Tel: 714-649-2728
Email: dljmail@aol.com

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Published by Harvard Family Research Project