Beyond the Grantee Journey: Evaluating Systemic Change in Housing Innovation

How do we know when a bold idea in housing has shifted from a pilot project to a force for systemic change? This Ignite presentation will explore how the Housing Affordability Breakthrough Challenge evaluation reimagined success—not by focusing solely on individual grantee journeys, but by asking: How has their collective pursuit of innovation changed the broader affordable housing ecosystem? The evaluation used systems thinking and developmental evaluation (Patton, 2011; Preskill & Gopal, 2014) to explore Enterprise Community Partners’ role as a systems-change intermediary and identify field-level influence. Key themes include cross-grantee learning, policy alignment, funding leverage, and the use of evaluation as a strategy for shared leadership and adaptive change. This session will use bold visuals, story-driven delivery, and practical takeaways to inspire evaluators to look beyond traditional impact metrics and toward ecosystem transformation, and to shift how we define success, and who we include in defining and evaluating it.

Romita Mitra; Nicole Williams