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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, …