Nonprofits, NGOs, and educational institutions need support to develop each child’s character strengths. This rigorous study, and the resulting evidence-based tools and resources it generates, will help organizations improve their practices and enable young people to flourish.

The Latin America and the Caribbean Alliance of YMCAs (LACA YMCA) is committed to youth development. Beginning in Colombia and Peru, the YMCA seeks to adapt a scalable tool to measure character virtues (CV) and gather feedback on program quality from youth. By measuring what matters, program staff can better understand their impact, share lessons learned, and make data-driven improvements, including professional development topics for staff.

The project will employ Hello Insight (https://helloinsight.org), a user-friendly online platform developed by YMCA partner Algorhythm (https://algorhythm.io). Combining rigorous research methods, next-generation analytics, and real-time technologies, Hello Insight is the backbone assessment of a multi-year character development initiative as well as ongoing learning and improvements at more than 200 YMCAs in the U.S. By engaging three to five local YMCA NGO partners in each country, the project will include the feedback of at least a hundred program staff and a thousand youth. The project will gather enough input and data to adapt and validate a research-based, reliable measure of character virtues. In the long term, it will create a pathway for scaling cost-effective program evaluation and ongoing learning within each country or region. In each pilot country, the team is engaging local stakeholders and experts in the adaptation process of the existing instruments to ensure cultural relevance and usability. while also leveraging Algorhythm strengths for the in-depth quantitative analyses and validation processes. This pilot project could eventually bring an innovative, real-time program assessment process to ignite greater character virtue outcomes in the region. ​​