The San Diego Public Regional Outcomes Standard Board (PROS Board) was established in 2022 by the San Diego Taxpayers Educational Foundation to develop regionally accepted and legitimate rules and methods of reporting outcomes, metrics, and accountability related to social good and public good programs for the Greater San Diego Region.
The first topic area will be homelessness services - an area of great concern to our community and also an area of great complexity. As a result, our initial work will narrow down this complex field to service providers who provide direct or voucher based access to beds anywhere from overnight shelters through permanent housing.
The initial year has been generously funded by contributions from the Lucky Duck Foundation, The San Diego Foundation, Gwendolyn Sontheim, and Joan & Irwin Jacobs.
The PROS Board is embodied by a group of civic minded professionals on the Data, Research, and Studies Committee of the San Diego Taxpayers Educational Foundation. That said, in essence, the community is the engine of the PROS Board in that every substantive step of the PROS Board will be informed by the community, subject matter experts, and stakeholders. Further, it will operate with full transparency and intends to develop standards based on research and arrived at by general consensus. The goal is to facilitate a process that results in standards in the field which allow everyone to trust the standard of care and outcomes reporting of the many groups who are doing good in our region.
With more than 10,000 nonprofit organizations in San Diego County, and many governments with objectives to achieve public good, many operate in the same or overlapping space.
Yet, it is difficult for the donor, government, community, prospective staff member, potential partner, or service recipient to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of any given nonprofit.
The PROS Board helps put forth a regionally accepted standard in each area in order to provide an apples to apples comparison.
“We need robust metrics to highlight what is working and what is not working so that we can scale up successes more quickly and efficiently - and serve San Diegans better than ever before.”
The PROSBoard was launched by the San Diego Taxpayers Educational Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 1988. Each domain and area of study approached by the PROS Board is informed by data scientists to create a collaborative effort of stakeholders that includes community members, elected officials, community leaders, subject matter experts, providers, and, where possible, service recipients.
The PROS Board is akin to a Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) which creates generally accepted methods for financial accounting – creating a consistent, understandable, and trusted construct by which people, organizations, and government entities can evaluate the financial standing of a company to guide their investments, how they choose to spend their money, or who they choose to partner with.
We are hosting a series of facilitated discussions in April 2022 to gather feedback from private funders, public funders, and service providers related to services, data, and reporting in the sector of homelessness bed provision. These meetings, along with feedback from current and former clients collected via other mechanisms, will help complete a document which will be released to the public called a Discussion Paper. This Discussion Paper aims to describe the overarching issues, challenges, and strengths with regard to meaningful performance reporting in the field. It is anticipated that these April meetings will begin to help prioritize the issues by consensus of the key stakeholders.
Following the release of the Discussion Paper, we anticipate creating interdisciplinary work groups by topic area to further prioritize and evaluate how the creation and adoption of governing standards may enhance trust and usability of performance reporting. At the same time, we want to rule out the creation of standards where the cost outweighs the benefit. These working groups will help with this prioritization, cost-benefit analysis, and drafting of proposed standards when warranted.
The PROS Board will provide the opportunity for San Diegans to trust the standard of care and operations of the many people who are doing good in our region.
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