Our Purpose
In order to make a more fair, equitable, and just society for all, we must understand the strengths, challenges, and opportunities across our communities. To achieve this end, the Culture of Results Initiative applies data to drive decisions about resources and determine which strategies would be most effective for creating positive change. We strive to build trust, collaboration, and lift the voices of those with diverse expertise and lived experiences in our planning processes. We build strong measurement, implementation, and improvement processes to demonstrate success and identify areas for growth. We operate with transparency, accountability, integrity, and inclusion as our core values.
Our Work
The Culture of Results (COR) initiative provides training and support to assess opportunities and impact, strengthen coordination, and improve and sustain programs and systems statewide. Culture of Results provides services to local, regional and state partners that include statewide initiatives, grassroots coalitions, local public health departments and hospital networks, universities, and community-based agencies. COR applies key aspects of empowerment evaluation— providing evaluation as part of an ongoing and inclusive planning process. We conduct rigorous research and provide capacity, coordination, communication, and accountability support to our partners. Partners develop the skills to assess the challenges and opportunities in their community and to evaluate their services. They build their abilities to implement, coordinate, adapt, expand, and communicate the impact of their work and their contribution to the health and wellbeing of the community.
Culture of Results team members engage partner organizations in learning and using Results-based Accountability (RBA) and its evidence-based, equity-focused tools to identify community results, prioritize and collect data, and plan, evaluate and improve their strategies. RBA is a framework for disciplined, methodical, and inclusive planning. RBA has been recognized by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institute of Health (NIH) and departments and agencies across North Carolina as an effective practice for planning, evaluation and improvement processes.
Our Approach
- Culture of Results applies Results-Based Accountability (RBA), an evidence-based, action-oriented, and data-driven framework to improve population health and wellbeing and program performance.
- Culture of Results also integrates Technology of Participation methods for focused discussion, action planning, and consensus building.
- Culture of Results frequently utilizes a Community Based Participatory Research and Action (CBPRA) Model, training and supporting community members to participate in and lead their own research and evaluation.
- The COR team brings racial equity and social justice lenses and experience in clinical health care, social work and program implementation.
- Culture of Results provides training and facilitation in RBA processes that can easily be used again and again to strengthen the capacity of programs to plan and evaluate their own work.
- Services are tailored to fit each client’s cultures, strengths, and needs. Packages can be modified to blend training with technical support to build upon existing team assets and work within resource constraints.
- Technical support and coaching enables clients to co-create evaluations to meet specific grant, government, or internal reporting requirements.
- RBA helps participants establish common ground and common language among diverse groups, making planning more inclusive and equitable.
- RBA focuses coalitions on aligned action and quality data for transparency and accountability, advancing collective impact approaches.
- As part of the North Carolina Center for Health & Wellness, COR works in partnership with networks across the state and through our Healthy Aging Initiative to promote fair opportunities for all communities.
- Culture of Results leverages the strength of the University of North Carolina Asheville’s community engagement efforts and academic programs as well as the UNC Gillings Master of Public Health in Asheville program, including faculty and student support for specific projects.
Our Impact
The NCCHW Culture of Results initiative has helped partners measure and expand impact, grow funding, assess and plan strategically, and strengthen community health improvement efforts. From 2017-2023, Culture of Results provided evidence-based training, planning, and/or support to over 4,850 individual leaders statewide.
The Culture of Results Initiative of the North Carolina Center for Health and Wellness strives to impact policies, build capacity, and ignite community initiatives into action. The team supports community-based programs that address critical health issues, promote replication of best-practice approaches, and apply interdisciplinary faculty and undergraduate research. Through technical assistance, program development, evaluation, and leadership, the Culture of Results initiative improves health systems and service providing programs to help advance health equity statewide.
Testimonials
“We can rethink the system. We can question our assumptions and inquire what is really important… The events in our community and across the country and the world make it important to remember that metrics and charts are irrelevant if they’re not in service to the right questions… Emma Olson [COR Director] reminded us last week that questions are the heart of the Results-based Accountability framework. Questions keep us focused on outcomes, which is important, but questions serve another purpose as well. They help us disrupt the inevitable pull toward the normal that will destroy not just our particular project or program, but everything we’re working toward as a city.”
–Eric Jackson, Manager, Office of Data & Performance – City of Asheville. Read the full quote. COR led an RBA training series for the City of Asheville Employees from 2020-2021.
“The NC Center for Health and Wellness has helped the Mothering Asheville movement establish how to evaluate and work towards progress in community capacity building, clinical shift, and policy change. They led our entire collaborative to create a shared vision, trained community-based doulas to develop criteria for assessing how our patients are better off, and built a Scorecard to measure our impact.”
– Maggie Adams, Director of Mothering Asheville, MAHEC Ob/GYN. COR provided training and technical assistance using RBA to the Mothering Asheville movement from 2016-2020.
More Information
To see a list of the services offered by the COR team, please review our COR Menu of Services.
To see examples of how CoR has supported various partners, visit our Collaborative Work page.
To learn more about RBA, check out this one-page RBA Fact Sheet.
Contact
Emma C. Olson, MSW, MPH
Interim Director NCCHW/ Associate Director
NC Center for Health and Wellness, UNC Asheville
eolson1@unca.edu (828) 258-7715
