Understanding Joy: Designing an Impact Assessment with Stanford Students
During the spring quarter of 2024, I had the pleasure of working with a group of students on a project as part of the Distinguished Visitor’s experience I participated in at Stanford University. The students were enrolled in a class I co-taught with Professor Kathleen Kelly Janus, Jason Su, Violet Saena, and Cecilia Taylor, titled Challenging the Status Quo.
For their community-engaged learning project, I asked the students to help design aspects of an assessment tool that organizations, agencies, and designers could use to understand the impact of joy in their work. This assessment is part of the joyful design framework I developed, inspired by the observation that many nonprofits and government agencies talk about the joy of the communities they serve, yet few, if any, have a method to truly understand what joy means to these communities—or to assess if their programs make space for that joy to exist.
I was fortunate to work with three exceptional students—Jackie Liu, Pleng Kruesopon, and Annella Tucker. I posed a simple yet curious question to them: How might we make assessment the most joyful part of a program or project? I also encouraged them to bring forward their lived experiences as we explored the concept of joy together. Not only did they complete a meaningful three-part literature review focused on scientific research and cultural expressions of joy, but they also developed an insightful approach to understanding and assessing joy, inspired by the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) study.
Project Reflect is currently pursuing funding to further develop and expand the assessment tool, with the ultimate goal of creating a resource that is freely accessible for organizations and various other entities to utilize.
Below is a glimpse of the report. If you would like to learn more or have resources that could support the development of this assessment, please contact us at Angela@projectreflect.com.
Executive Summary
In the nonprofit world, assessments are ubiquitous. To receive funding from foundations, governmental entities, or individual philanthropists, nonprofit organizations must provide quantifiable metrics that “prove” the impact of their programming. These high-level outcomes – such as employment rates, annual income, college matriculation rates, or number of people served – often lose the nuances of day-to-day experience and quality of life for the organization’s beneficiaries. How might measuring something like joy shift values and priorities among funders and organizations alike? With our project, we created a paradigm to assess joy that balances a capaciousness for self-definition and expansion, while remaining quantifiable enough to be comparable before and after a given intervention to demonstrate its effectiveness. Our deliverable consists of two components: (1) the Self-Definition Pre-Survey, which will determine the aspects of joy the community finds most salient, and (2) the Joy Assessment, which will translate the community’s self-definition of joy into tangible questions, to be used by the organization before and after the intervention to measure its impact. Based on our literature review and interview findings, we consolidated a list of the primary components of joy, from which we generated a menu of corresponding assessment questions that organizations can choose from and adapt. In this way, we provide more standardization to a nebulous concept like joy, while still empowering individual communities to have a say in what it means to them.