Selected Work · Case Study

Central Providence Health Equity Zone

Place-based evaluation across housing, food access, built environment, and community safety in one of Rhode Island’s most underserved neighborhoods.

Initiative
Central Providence Unidos (HEZ)
Funder
Rhode Island Department of Health
Role
Evaluation support
Domain
Health equity, SDOH

The decision the evaluation needed to inform

Primary decision-maker question

Which of the HEZ’s resident-led, place-based strategies are producing the conditions needed for residents to act on social determinants of health — and which need to be redesigned, sunset, or scaled?

The evaluation was scoped around two named primary users: backbone-organization leadership and the funder’s HEZ program officers. Both needed the same answer expressed in different forms — one for internal strategy reviews, one for state reporting. Every element of the design served those two uses.

What we did

  • Co-designed the theory of change with backbone-organization staff and a resident leadership council, surfacing assumptions about which mechanisms (resident voice, mini-grants, policy advocacy, built-environment work) were expected to drive outcomes — and which were unstated.
  • Built a mixed-methods data infrastructure: structured tracking of resident-led projects, focus groups with project leaders, key informant interviews with municipal partners, and integration with existing community health needs assessment data.
  • Designed reporting cadences specific to each primary user — quarterly briefs for state program officers, narrative-and-numbers internal memos for backbone leadership, and resident-facing dashboards translated into Spanish.
  • Convened cross-strategy learning sessions twice yearly so that residents leading different projects (food access, safer streets, housing) could interpret each other’s findings and surface system-level patterns.
  • Embedded the three equity questions — who benefits, who is missing, whose voice shapes the narrative — into every quarterly review, with specific data routines for each.

What changed

Findings drove three concrete decisions: the backbone organization restructured one strategy that was producing activity but not population-level traction; the funder cited the evaluation’s framing in their next HEZ-wide reporting template; and the resident leadership council formalized a role in interpreting evaluation findings before they reached the funder, not after.

The most durable outcome may be the least visible one: resident leaders now expect to be co-authors of the narrative the evaluation tells about their neighborhood, and the data infrastructure supports that.

Figure 1 · Logic model

Central Providence HEZ — theory of change at a glance

Central Providence HEZ logic model Five-column logic model: inputs feed activities, which produce outputs, leading to short-term outcomes and long-term population-level outcomes in social determinants of health. Inputs Activities Outputs Short-term outcomes Population outcomes HEZ designation + RIDOH funding Backbone organization + resident leadership Community partners (municipal, CBO, clinical) Existing CHNA data + resident knowledge Resident leadership cohorts Mini-grants for resident-led projects Built-environment improvements Policy & systems advocacy # residents trained in leadership cohorts # mini-grants awarded + project completion rate # improvements delivered (food, safety, green space) # policy briefs delivered + adoption tracker Resident voice in neighborhood planning Improved access to fresh food & safer streets Stronger civic networks across CBOs & residents Reduced disparities in social determinants of health in Central Providence (Long-term, population-level; tracked via state SDOH indicators) Three equity questions ride every row 1. Who benefits?   ·   2. Who is missing from the data?   ·   3. Whose voice shapes the narrative?
Illustrative logic model showing how inputs and activities produce outputs and short-term outcomes en route to population-level change. The three equity questions are applied across every row of the model, in the evaluation plan and in each quarterly review.
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