Author Archive

H. Kay Howard

About the author

H. Kay Howard
As a Director in Third Sector’s Boston office, H. Kay delivers feasibility assessments, technical assistance, and project construction support to government, nonprofit, and philanthropic clients. Prior to joining Third Sector, H. Kay worked at Civic Consulting Alliance, a public sector consulting firm in Chicago, where she led a project to physically redesign Cook County Central Bond Court in order to promote fairer bond-setting and lower the daily jail population.

New Partnerships to Stem COVID Learning Loss: School districts and tutoring providers explore outcomes-based contracting in K-12 math education

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Third Sector and the Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research (CEPR) collaborated to lead an Outcomes-Based Contracting (OBC) Summit, a four-workshop virtual series exploring outcomes contracting in K-12 math instruction. The OBC Summit was funded by Schmidt Futures.   Summit participants learned about the nuances of outcomes-based contracting and defined an approach for their organization. [...]
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Doing More with LessLessons from Listening Social Service Agencies’ Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Governments are struggling to do more with less–that’s the key message we took away from our conversations with leaders in social service agencies across the country.

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Principles for Continuous Improvement: Santa Cruz Human Services Department’s Journey

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We want to share the story of Santa Cruz’s Human Services Department (HSD) outcomes contracting transformation, in which they moved through the steps we outlined in the first and second blog series. By the end of their two-year engagement with Third Sector that focused on improving their TANF Welfare to Work (WTW) subsidized employment programming, Santa Cruz HSD had built a more collaborative relationship with their two providers and had developed new outcomes and metrics to regularly review and work towards.

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Principles for Continuous Improvement: Collaborative, Data-Driven Conversations

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This is the second post in our data-driven continuous improvement blog series. To read the first blog on best practices for creating a data dashboard, click here. In this post, we’ll share three tips for continuous improvement conversations. The data is ready. The graphs are finalized. The trends are highlighted. Your shiny new report detailing [...]
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Principles for Continuous Improvement: Building a Data Dashboard

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“What gets measured gets managed” is an oft-repeated line in the nonprofit performance management world, and one that we at Third Sector have found holds true. That’s why we work closely with our government and community partners to ensure that “what gets managed” are long-term, meaningful outcomes that demonstrate that individuals and families are better [...]
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Impact vs. Intent: Initial Lessons from Third Sector’s Equity Journey

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What does a low-income community look like? What systems and programs, while often well-intentioned, serve as the foot of oppression for keeping this neighborhood economically poor?

After conducting this power analysis as part of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism Workshop, hosted by Living Cities, there was no denying the immense privilege and power Third Sector has to influence systems and their outcomes for low-income communities and communities of color. This was a wake-up call for us. It helped us to understand the role we potentially play in perpetuating systemic inequities

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