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In Conversation: Two Community Foundations In Dialogue About Their Equitable Evaluation Framework™ Practice, Madeline Brandt, Kelly Casey, Jean-Marie Callan, Joel Hicks-Rivera, Kim Leonard, Madeline Nguyen, Elena Tamanas Ragusa, Cierra Stancil, Kimberlee Salmond, Becky Seel, Kate Szczerbacki

The Foundation Review

This conversation between staff at the Oregon Community Foundation and the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving shares how we are infusing the Equitable Evaluation Framework™ into our practice as we aim to be less extractive, shift power, and honor all ways of knowing and being as valid. In sharing this conversation, we want to pull the curtain back and offer a behind-the-scenes view into the conversations, realities, and challenges involved in doing this kind of work.

We sat down together for 90 minutes on a Wednesday afternoon, and the following is a rough transcript of our time together. The intention …

Out Of Crisis, Learnings Shape Future Grantmaking, Stacie S. Cherner

The Foundation Review

Like other philanthropic organizations during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jim Joseph Foundation took steps to loosen grant requirements, support CEOs and leadership teams, and provide funding for emergencies and innovations.

The foundation, which strives to bring consistent expertise with evaluation and research in untroubled times and whose mission is to foster effective Jewish learning experiences for young Jews, has a unique perspective when reflecting on learning. So another area that required flexibility was in the re-examination of learning plans to take advantage of the “forced experimentation” imposed by the pandemic lockdown.

In March 2020, the foundation …

Learning Amid Disruption: Bouncing Forward Into A Changed World, Rachel Reichenbach, Jewlya Lynn, Jen Heeg

The Foundation Review

The philanthropic sector has come to recognize the importance of bringing a systems lens to its work, seeking to influence upstream drivers of complex problems, and being adaptive in its approaches instead of implementing static, multiyear plans. Yet, integrating these concepts into practice continues to pose a challenge.

Humanity United — a foundation dedicated to cultivating the conditions for enduring freedom and peace — had been grappling with this charge when the disruption caused by COVID-19 led it into a crisis response mode in 2020, similar to many other philanthropic institutions. That disruption also challenged our old ways of being, …

Evaluators As Conduits And Supports For Foundation Learning, Clare Nolan, Meg Long, Debra Joy Perez

The Foundation Review

Evaluators play a critical role in supporting philanthropic learning, programming, and strategy, but evaluation and learning in philanthropy is often limited in ways that impede deeper resonance and impact.

Most philanthropic evaluation is focused on the needs of individual foundations, knowledge sharing with the broader field is limited, and foundations struggle to integrate evaluation and learning as a management tool. This article makes the case that evaluators and funders can do more to build the collective capacity of evaluators working in philanthropy in order to enhance their contributions to community change.

This article also examines the ways that evaluation in …

Cricket Island Foundation: A Case Study Of A Small Foundation’S Impact Assessment, Anna Pond, Seema Shah, Elizabeth Sak

The Foundation Review

In 2015, the Cricket Island Foundation conducted a multimethod assessment of its grantmaking portfolio to examine its impact and inform future decision-making and strategy. The foundation, which supports youth-led social change using a cohort-based model, focuses on emerging and medium-sized organizations and provides capacity-building supports to help organizations achieve greater organizational sustainability.

The assessment focused on two of the foundation's three cohorts and found positive trends in five key areas of desired impact: organizational capacity, youth leadership, nonprofit executive leadership, grantee collaboration and learning, and funder policy and practice. The assessment also identified areas for improvement to strengthen future impact, …

Foundations As Network Strategists, Weavers, And Managers: Learning From One Foundation’S Journey And Results, Clare Nolan, Brian Souza, Michael Monopoli, Marianne Hughes

The Foundation Review

This article shares insights from a five-year evaluation of the Oral Health 2020 network, an effort by the DentaQuest Foundation to align and strengthen efforts in service of a national movement to improve oral health. The evaluation helped to place the foundation’s journey in the context of a broader field seeking new approaches to achieve deep and sustainable social change.

The foundation’s approach was informed by several ideas that have gained momentum in the social sector, including collective impact, networks, systems change, and equity – all of which challenged the foundation to take a nontraditional approach that combined the roles …

A Neighborhood-Based Family Center Redesign Process: Taking A Systems Perspective, Patricia Bowie, Richard Sussman

The Foundation Review

This article describes how the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, with a subset of its grantees and their program recipients, teamed with the UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities to redesign its evaluation process.

The foundation’s shift from traditional program evaluation to a more participatory, learning-focused approach resulted in new tools to assess variables that had been previously unexamined but were critical to program success.

This article examines the redesign process and those new tools – the data from which are being used to improve employee engagement and front-line practice as part of a cross-agency learning network – …

How Do You Measure Up? Finding Fit Between Foundations And Their Evaluation Functions, Julia Coffman, Tanya Beer

The Foundation Review

As the number of foundations has grown, the philosophies and ways of working across the sector have diversified. This variance means that there is no one right model for how a foundation’s evaluation function should be designed. It is imperative for a foundation to think carefully about how the structure, position, focus, resources, and practices of its evaluation function can best fit its own needs and aspirations.

This article focuses on questions foundations can ask to assess that fit, and the specific considerations that can inform these decisions. It draws on 2015 benchmarking research conducted by the Center for Evaluation …

Developing A Framework For Grant Evaluation: Integrating Accountability And Learning, Shelley Scherer

The Foundation Review

Despite broad consensus among foundations on the value of capturing grant outcomes, there is no consensus on what to evaluate and how to define success, which makes it difficult for staff and grantees to navigate and apply multiple interpretations of evaluation “best practices.”

This article presents three questions designed to help foundations develop a framework for grant evaluation that reflects their beliefs about accountability and learning, balances evaluation costs and benefits, acknowledges the diversity of grants within the foundation’s portfolio, and allows their grantees to understand the foundation’s expectations for evaluation reporting.

A key takeaway from this article, drawn from …

Using A Priority Grid As A Tool For Shaping Strategy And Building Impact, Lori Fuller

The Foundation Review

· This article describes the priority grid – an analytic tool to assess grant proposals – and how it has fundamentally changed and improved the work of the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust.

· Developed by the Trust, the priority grid focuses staff attention on key strategic elements: alignment with focus areas, depth of impact, and scope of impact. It has also served as an agent to develop, disseminate, and implement a foundation’s grantmaking strategy, helping program officers understand how specific projects serve the larger goal and cultivate projects and applications that align with the foundation’s long-term mission.

· With …

From Citywide To Neighborhood-Based: Two Decades Of Learning, Prioritization, And Strategic Action To Build The Skillman Foundation’S Youth-Development Systems, Della M. Hughes, Marie Colombo, Laura A. Hughes, Sara Plachta Elliott, Andrew Schneider-Munoz

The Foundation Review

· This article explores the Skillman Foundation’s shift in its approach to fulfilling its mission to improve the lives of children and youth and to making grants – moving from a traditional grantmaker to a place-based investor and change-maker.

· Three aspects of Skillman’s approach have directly shaped the evolution of its youth-development investments: recognizing Detroit’s economic, social, political, and environmental challenges; articulating overarching goals to provide direction and setting priorities for the scope and focus of its programmatic work; and using rapid learning to inform strategic decisions and social-innovation practices designed to tackle deeply entrenched problems.

· This article …

Benchmarking Evaluation In Foundations: Do We Know What We Are Doing?, Julia Coffman, Tanya Beer, Patricia Patrizi, Elizabeth Heid Thompson

The Foundation Review

· Evaluation in philanthropy – with staff assigned to evaluation-related responsibilities – began in the 1970s and has evolved, along with philanthropy, in the four decades since. What has not changed, however, is a regular questioning of what foundations are doing on evaluation, especially since the world of philanthropy regularly shifts, and changes in evaluation resourcing and positioning tend to soon follow.

· This article presents new findings about what foundations are doing on evaluation and discusses their implications. It is based on 2012 research that benchmarks the positioning, resourcing, and function of evaluation in foundations, and follows up on …

Eyes Wide Open: Learning As Strategy Under Conditions Of Complexity And Uncertainty, Patricia Patrizi, Elizabeth Heid Thompson, Julia Coffman, Tanya Beer

The Foundation Review

· Foundation strategy is hampered by a failure to recognize and engage with the complexity and uncertainty surrounding foundation work. This article identifies three common “traps” that hinder foundation capacity to learn and adapt: 1) linearity and certainty bias; 2) the autopilot effect; and 3) indicator blindness.

· This article urges foundations to alter their mindset, questions, and processes to foster a more committed approach to strategy and adaptation. In essence, it argues for learning as strategy.

· This article draws on literature from systems theory, business strategy, and philanthropic practice as well as data from foundation benchmarking surveys.