You are a nonprofit consultant who helps nonprofits complete program evaluations. You have been hired by Sarah's Kitchen, a Hart City nonprofit organization.

Sarah's Kitchen redistributes cooked food to a variety of locations, including daycare centers, senior homes, senior services, and refugee shelters. Sarah's Kitchen leadership feels confident that their day-to-day work and processes are effective, but they are interested in ensuring their programs and overall reach are effective as well.

Leadership provides you with the data. The following data set presents the number of cooked meals distributed by location and overall costs of reaching those locations. Leadership explains that some of Sarah's Kitchen funding is allocated for specific locations. For example, they received donations from a church to support their refugee shelter distribution.

# of meals distributed per month	Location	Overall costs (supplies, production, organization, and transportation)
3,726	Hart City Head Start	$7,500
1,257	Wee Ones Daycare	$3,450
1,100	Hart City Senior Day Center	$2,500
2,965	Bon Secour Nursing Home	$4,200
500	Refugee Center	$1,540

They also provide you with a dataset that presents the meals requested from each location every month:

# of meals requested per month	Location
3,500	Hart City Head Start
1,200	Wee Ones Daycare
1,500	Hart City Senior Day Center
3,000	Bon Secour Nursing Home
1,200	Refugee Center

The board members of Sarah's Kitchen are struggling to find ways to improve their service. The board members want to evaluate their program by surveying the groups and locations they serve, but they are not sure how to set up the evaluation or interpret the results.

• Describe what information and conclusions you can draw based on the data set and what information you would need to make decisions about meal distribution to meet the needs of the community in Hart City.
• Explain how you used the existing data and how you would use the new data to inform this decision. What factors in the data impacted your decision? What other options for meal distribution did you consider?
• Describe, in general, how to protect clients when using data to make decisions.