HOW WE MEASURE WHAT MATTERS
At Able Athletics, we believe accountability to our community means more than good intentions. It means listening, learning, and sharing what we find.
At the close of each session, we reach out directly to participating families and volunteers with a brief survey. Their honest feedback shapes how we grow, and it's the foundation of everything you see on our impact page.
Our surveys are brief, anonymous, and built around what matters most:
For athletes and their families: We ask about the quality of their experience, whether the program felt tailored to their athlete's needs, and the difference Able Athletics made in their quality of life.
For volunteers: We ask about the meaningfulness of their contribution, how the experience shaped their perspective on inclusivity, and whether they'd recommend it to others.
The results are shared openly, because a movement built on inclusion should be transparent about the difference it's making.
What is it worth when every child gets to play?
We set out to measure the difference Able Athletics makes, not only for our athletes, but for the families living these challenging lives alongside them. This is what we found, and how we found it.
Using a method called Social Return on Investment, we estimate that every dollar invested in Able Athletics returns roughly three to four dollars in social and economic value to families and the community.
This is an estimate presented as a range, built from a survey of participating families and a fully accounted view of what it truly costs to run our programs. We describe the method, and its limits, openly below.
Accountability means more than good intentions
At Able Athletics, being accountable to our community means listening, learning, and sharing what we find. We can all see what adaptive sport does on the field. What is harder to show is the fuller picture: the therapy costs a family no longer carries, the hours a caregiver gets back, the healthier and more connected child who comes home from practice, and the parent who finally has somewhere to belong too.
Those things are real, but they rarely reach the people who decide where funding goes, because no one has translated them into terms funders recognize. So this year we did. The result is The Return on Inclusion, an independent study that turns the difference we make into a number, while staying honest that the deepest value lives in the parts a number can only point at, not fully capture.
The families told us, in their own words
We invited the families and caregivers of our athletes to complete a brief, anonymous survey about their experience with Able Athletics. Their honest answers are the foundation of everything on this page. We asked about the quality of their experience, whether the program truly fit their athlete's needs, how their family's costs and time changed, and the difference Able Athletics made in their quality of life.
We then valued what they reported against published national research, and compared it to the full cost of running our programs, including the volunteer time and donated resources most organizations leave out. Counting those honestly is what makes the result one we can stand behind.
For athletes and their families
The quality of the experience, whether the program felt tailored to their athlete's needs, how their household costs and caregiving time changed, and the difference Able Athletics made in their family's quality of life.
"I've never seen him smile, laugh and give 100% participation in an activity and i'm ecstatic to witness it."
Able Athletics parent"For the first time, I've been able to sit on the sidelines with a cup of coffee in my hand and watch my son play a sport."
Able Athletics parent"I've finally found a place where I don't have to apologize for my child's challenges and can focus on their achievements and connect with other parents living a similar challenging life."
Able Athletics parentHonest about the number, and its limits
We present our finding as a range, roughly three to four times, rather than a single precise figure, because the honest answer is a range. It rests on a survey of our own families and on estimates of what our programs truly cost, some of which we are still documenting. It describes Able Athletics specifically and should not be read as a claim about adaptive sports everywhere.
We also did not try to put a dollar value on everything. The friendships, the confidence, the sense of belonging, and the community families find on our sidelines are the heart of this work, and we chose to report those honestly rather than reduce them to a line item. A conservative, well documented estimate that still returns three to four times its cost is a stronger foundation for trust than an impressive number that cannot survive a hard question.
A movement built on inclusion should be transparent about the difference it makes.
We share these results openly. This work also inspired Prove, a free tool built to make this kind of measurement accessible, so that any adaptive sports program can measure its own impact and make its case in the language funders respect. Because when every child gets to play, and every family feels less alone, the return reaches all of us.