Nonprofit Administration and Management Commons^™

Can Coaching Help Community Partnerships Promote Health Equity, Community Engagement, And Policy, Systems, And Environmental Changes? Results From An Evaluation, Jung Y. Kim, Lisa Schottenfeld, Michael Cavanaugh

The Foundation Review

Foundations and other entities have increasingly funded coaching and technical assistance to support multisector community partnerships to promote health and health equity. However, much remains to be learned about how coaching can best support these partnerships.

As part of its efforts to build a culture in which everyone in the United States has a fair opportunity to be healthy, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute to provide structured coaching to strengthen the capacities of community partnerships. The foundation contracted with Mathematica to evaluate the coaching program, focusing on whether it had an …

Building Nonprofit Capacity To Achieve Greater Impact: Lessons From The U.S.-Mexico Border, Meg Loomis, Shirly Thomas, Carla Taylor

The Foundation Review

Foundations often rely on strong relationships with grantees doing frontline work in marginalized communities. Yet these nonprofits typically face myriad financial and policy pressures that must be managed amid increasing need for their services. Helping them expand their impact requires funders to invest in their grantees’ organizational health and capacity.

This article discusses the capacity-building funding experiences of Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, which saw firsthand the needs of grantees when it partnered with eight community-health organizations through its Sí Texas initiative and, in response, created a $1.5 million capacity-building program for those organizations.

This article also shares the …

Scaling Programs With Research Evidence And Effectiveness (Spree), Nan Maxwell, Scott Richman

The Foundation Review

Foundations can serve more people by identifying and supporting effective interventions that are ready to be scaled. This article describes a process called SPREE — Scaling Programs with Research Evidence and Effectiveness — that can help funders and their grantees scale successfully. Implementing this process can assist foundations in using evaluation research as a tool to determine which interventions are likely to produce desired outcomes, and to identify which organizations are ready to scale them. The SPREE process is grounded in evaluation and implementation science frameworks and has been applied since 2016 by the Corporation for National and Community Service. …

2019 Improving The Lives Of San Diego County Seniors Through Stable Housing: An Evaluation Of Elderhelp's Homeshare Program, Tessa Tinkler, Lisa Walker, Mary Jo Schumann

Seniors

This report, prepared by the Nonprofit Institute's Caster Center, documents the findings from a program evaluation of ElderHelp's HomeShare program, which is designed to connect individuals who want to share their homes with others looking for alternative housing options.

Evaluating For The Bigger Picture: Breaking Through The Learning And Evaluation Barriers To Advancing Community Systems-Change Field Knowledge, Thomas Kelly, Prudence Brown, Hanh Cao Yu, Marie Colombo

The Foundation Review

Foundations investing in community systems change often fail to prioritize field-level and cross-initiative evaluation questions in building initiatives. As a result, many of the documented evaluations of such investments lack translatable lessons specific and influential enough to drive related decisions and actions of others in the field.

This article developed from ongoing, multiyear peer learning across several foundations that collectively compiled recommendations for community systems-change funders and evaluators to implement more powerful evaluations. They are intended to help funders and evaluators engaged in these efforts build sectorwide knowledge capable of informing improved work across initiatives and communities. This article also …

Challenges To Effective Monitoring And Evaluation Systems: Lessons From Afghanistan, Qudratullah Jahid

Sustainability and Social Justice

How can monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems better support improving the aid effectiveness? What are the existing challenges to the M&E systems in Afghanistan? I try to answer these questions by briefly looking at the development aid in Afghanistan since 2001. I provide summary of attempts made at improving aid effectiveness through mutual accountability frameworks. I then try to briefly discuss the principles of Paris Declaration and provide brief insights from Afghanistan. I then discuss the status of monitoring and evaluation in Afghanistan by providing a picture functional M&E system and then discussing the existing challenges in Afghanistan. Finally, I …

2019 Empowering Aging Adults To Improve Health: An Evaluation Of Olivewood Gardens Cooking For Salud Program, Tessa Tinkler, Michelle Schneider

Seniors

The report, prepared by The Nonprofit Institute's Caster Family Center for Nonprofit & Philanthropic Research, documents the findings from a program evaluation of Olivewood Gardens and Learning Center's Cooking for Salud program which is an adult nutrition education program designed to support the health and well being of adults 55+ years in National City and San Diego's southeastern region.

Knowledge Translation To Enhance Evaluation Use: A Case Example, Alison Rogers, Catherine Malla

The Foundation Review

Knowledge in the form of information suitable for decision making or advocacy by foundations is not always readily available — a situation unacceptable for those who need such information for accountability, learning, and influencing policy and practice. This article addresses how essential information about monitoring, evaluation, and lessons learned can be made available to foundations.

The Fred Hollows Foundation identified a gap in this area through an evaluation capacity-building readiness assessment, and introduced the concept of participatory, real-time monitoring, evaluation, and learning bulletins grounded in the principles of knowledge translation. This article describes how those bulletins were developed and used …

Strategic Learning In Practice: A Case Study Of The Kauffman Foundation, Matthew Carr, Brett Hembree, Nathan Madden

The Foundation Review

Increasingly, foundations and nonprofits are seeking to engage their staff in learning and reflection activities that assess successes and challenges, and then generate insights that can improve programs and funding strategies. Yet, despite the intuitive benefits, there are common challenges that often stand in the way of promoting strategic learning for continuous improvement.

For the past year, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has been focused on creating more systematic and intentional strategic learning across our organization. As part of this work we cultivated a select cohort of staff to be “learning champions,” created simple tools and processes that can more …

Shifting Mindsets: How Meaningful Accountability Systems Can Strengthen Foundation Learning And Improve Impact, Marc J. Holley, Marcie Parkhurst

The Foundation Review

This article explores what it looks like when a foundation attempts to integrate accountability and learning practices, and presents a framework for the unique and complementary contributions that accountability and learning can make to the work of foundations.

The article also looks at the tensions that can arise when a foundation’s internal evaluation staff attempt to design, implement, and make use of accountability systems. Specifically, it identifies three problematic perspectives that can hold foundations back from full engagement in internally driven accountability initiatives, and offers practical guidance on how to shift these mindsets to more productive practices.

It concludes by …

Building Principle-Based Strategic Learning: Insights From Practice, Kelci M. Price, Chera Reid, Suzanne Kennedy Leahy

The Foundation Review

Strategic learning is a powerful tool for foundations to achieve greater impact, yet foundations have struggled to create practices and behaviors that effectively support them in learning about strategy. Given that many foundations are engaged in strategic philanthropy, where they have specific conditions in the world they are trying to change, it is critical that they have the capacity to effectively learn about and improve their strategies.

This article offers three principles for strategic learning, informed by the field of strategic learning and insights from practice across three foundations. Each principle is explored in terms of what it means and …

Challenges And Opportunities In Philanthropic Organizational Learning: Reflections From Fellow Grantmakers, Jennifer Chubinski, Kelley Adcock, Susan Sprigg

The Foundation Review

As the field of philanthropy has matured, increasing attention has been paid to evaluating the impact of philanthropic investments. In recent years, the scope of evaluation has expanded to include an intentional focus on organizational learning with the goal of learning from ongoing work, informing decision-making, and ultimately improving impact.

With this momentum to carry out organizational learning strategies and share successes, the sector has not yet stopped to reflect on challenges and lessons learned in the process of building the capacity for organizational learning — the messy yet meaningful middle between a desire for learning and the implementation of …

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 …

Performance Measurement In Maine’S Social Sector: The Intersection Of Philanthropy And Nonprofits, Susy Hawes, Sarah Goan

Children, Youth, & Families

The Data Innovation Project undertook this project to better understand foundations’ expectations of grantees in terms of performance measures and outcomes as outlined in their grant applications. Over the past two years, the Data Innovation Project has engaged with over 250 Maine nonprofits who are navigating the data reporting requirements of a diverse portfolio of funders with varying degrees of success and challenges. This paper looks more closely at how the important relationship between foundations and nonprofits may benefit from increased understanding and clarity around measurement approaches so that both dollars and efforts lead to meaningful and measureable results across …

Thriving Communities: A Model For Community-Engaged Grantmaking, Mary Francis, Colleen Desmond, Jeffrey Williams, Jennifer Chubinski, Jennifer Zimmerman, Ashlee Young

The Foundation Review

Interact for Health is a health conversion foundation serving the three-state region of Greater Cincinnati, Ohio. Its current community change initiative, Thriving Communities, is a community-learning model that helps embed health promotion and advocacy work in communities while those communities build an equitable infrastructure with stakeholders to more rapidly spread evidence-based practices.

This article explores the three tools developed for the Thriving Communities initiative: Success Markers, the Developmental Pathway, and Relationship Mapping. Interact for Health has found that these tools build core competencies and confidence among grantees as well as a process for community engagement that produces results at the …

Unplanned Donor Legacies: How To Avoid Them, And How One Family Foundation Corrected Course With An Evaluation, Saphira Maude Baker, Kelly Chopus, Casey Cox, Anita Mcginty

The Foundation Review

As funders turn to community change, intentionally addressing the unique power differential between funder and grantee partners and structuring ways to mitigate this imbalance is essential to honest communication. Funder relationships with their grantees impact the legacy of major community initiatives. This article explores this relationship and its effects through the lens of the recent evaluation of one family foundation — the Robins Foundation in Richmond, Virginia — and its follow-up actions.

Through a participatory evaluation process, we derived three principal approaches for this donor, and others, to consider in contemplating funder-grantee partnerships and the way these may influence the …

2018 Navigating The Future: Transforming The Transition Experience For Service Members And Their Families, Kim D. Hunt, Mary Jo Schumann, Aya Tore

Military

This report, prepared by the Caster Center, is an evaluation of Year 3 of zero8hundred. Zero8hundred is a cross-sector community initiative whose mission is to proactively link transitioning service members and their families to resources and opportunities in the community, helping them successfully transition to civilian life.

Aligning Evaluation And Strategy With The Mission Of A Community-Focused Foundation, Claudio Balestri

The Foundation Review

Foundations are commonly recognized as having a comparative advantage in supporting forward-looking projects and programs. In this sense, the long term represents the natural horizon in which the foundations are called to fulfill their mission to plan and develop philanthropic activities and, therefore, the time reference for assessing results.

When a mission is focused more on improving the quality of life in a specific community than on addressing a specific social problem, evaluation of outcomes becomes more challenging. While available methods can provide valuable support to measuring the impact of a foundation’s specific program, they are unlikely to provide an …

2017 Food, Friendship, And Health: Working Together To Serve Seniors In North County San Diego, Michelle Ahearne, Meghan Kelly, Mary Jo Schumann

Seniors

This report, prepared by the Caster Center, is a three-year evaluation of the North County Senior Connections Thyme Together Food Truck Lunch Program.

Transforming Coalition Leadership: An Evaluation Of A Collaborative Leadership Training Program, Jung Y. Kim, Todd Honeycutt, Michaella Morzuch

The Foundation Review

Effective coalitions need leaders who are able to reach beyond individual, group, and sectoral boundaries to advance a shared vision for healthy and thriving communities. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation partnered with the Center for Creative Leadership to create a one-year pilot, the Community Coalition Leadership Program, to test a new approach to providing training in collaborative leadership.

This article discusses the program, whether and how it improved participants’ individual and coalition leadership skills, and the implications for foundations and other entities seeking to increase interdependent leadership capacity within community coalitions. This article does not, however, intend to describe progress …

Considerations For Measuring The Impact Of Policy-Relevant Research, Megan Collado, Lauren Gerlach, Caroline Ticse, Katherine Hempstead

The Foundation Review

Philanthropy, and the research and analysis it supports, has an important role to play in informing policy and making government more effective. Yet all too often, foundations and other research funders struggle to understand whether and how their investments have affected policy.

This article highlights the findings of an 18-month pilot project conducted by AcademyHealth to help the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation better understand the impact of a subset of the foundation’s research grants, across investment types, on health insurance coverage and health reform, and to help inform how the foundation may more systematically track and measure the impact of …

2017 The Impact Of Reading Aloud To Children: An Evaluation Of The Words Alive Read Aloud Program, Caster Family Center For Nonprofit And Philanthropic Research, University Of San Diego

Youth, Education, and Literacy

This report, prepared by the Caster Center, is an evaluation of the Words Alive Read Aloud Program. Words Alive is a nonprofit organization focused on creating opportunities for life success by inspiring a commitment to reading.

2017 Fostering Whole Person Care Through A Care Coordination Network: Community Information Exchange San Diego, The Caster Family Center For Nonprofit And Philanthropic Research, University Of San Diego

Seniors

2-1-1 San Diego commissioned the University of San Diego’s Caster Family Center for Nonprofit and Philanthropic Research to conduct the Community Information Exchange (CIE) Cohort 2 evaluation, which focused on the senior (defined as ages 60+) population in the San Diego region.

Using a technology platform where agencies can enter and share client data, CIE strives to foster whole person care for the populations it serves (e.g., homeless, seniors, military), as well as reduce duplicative intakes and services provided by healthcare and social service agencies. By consenting into CIE, clients give permission for data sharing and may receive multiple referrals …

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 …

Marguerite Casey Foundation: Reflecting On 15 Years Of Philanthropic Leadership Through A Summative Evaluation, Mavis Sanders, Claudia Galindo, Luz Vega-Marquis, Cheryl Milloy

The Foundation Review

This article presents the findings of a summative evaluation of the Marguerite Casey Foundation that was conducted on the occasion of its 15th anniversary. The evaluation was designed to gauge stakeholders’ perceptions of the foundation’s operations to facilitate organizational learning. In sharing these results, the authors seek to elucidate the role of evaluation as a learning practice within the field of philanthropy.

The article describes the foundation’s organizational elements and evolution and discusses key themes that emerged from qualitative data collected from foundation leaders and staff, as well as findings from a survey of current grantees.

The article presents a …

A Community Foundation’S Experience Implementing And Evaluating General Operating Support, Annemarie Riemer, Erika Frank, Hedda Rublin, Susan Merrow-Kehoe

The Foundation Review

In 2013, the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving began to offer unrestricted general operating support grants in response to grantees’ expressed need. The foundation hired Technical Development Corp., a Boston consulting firm, to evaluate the process and implementation.

This article shares early indicators of the impact of the new grantmaking approach on both grantees and the foundation. Grantee outcomes include enhanced infrastructure and financial health, continued progress on strategic plan goals, and more creative thinking about programs. Beyond the adoption of a new funding option, the decision led the foundation to modify its overall grantmaking process.

The greatest challenge – …

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 – …

2017 Zero8hundred's Continuing The Promise Of A New Day: Support For Service Members Transitioning To Civilian Life In San Diego, Kim D. Hunt, Mary Jo Schumann

Military

This report, prepared by the Caster Center, is a 2-year evaluation report about zero8hundred. Zero8hundred is a cross-sector community initiative whose mission is to proactively link transitioning service members and their families to resources and opportunities in the community, helping them successfully transition to civilian life.

End-Game Evaluation: Building A Legacy Of Learning In A Limited-Life Foundation, Ashleigh Halverstadt, Benjamin Kerman

The Foundation Review

This article shares the emerging hypotheses of two foundations, The Atlantic Philanthropies and the S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation — each four years from sunset — about the opportunities and challenges for evaluation in the limited-life context.

Few, if any, of the problems philanthropy seeks to address can be solved within a brief, defined time frame. Limited-life foundations can only strive to move the ball down the field before they sunset, and then enlist others to carry the work forward. Given this reality, these foundations are obligated to make a deliberate effort to share what they have learned with the …

Evaluation At Sunset: Considerations When Evaluating A Program As It Concludes, Blair Beadnell, Holly Carmichael Djang, Jan Vanslyke, Barbara Andersen

The Foundation Review

While the benefits of beginning evaluation efforts at a program’s inception are well known, for a variety of reasons many organizations are unable to do so and instead begin these efforts closer to a program’s conclusion.

Previously reported findings from a sunset evaluation of the Orfalea Foundation’s School Food Initiative showed positive outcomes of the initiative’s activities and provided recommendations for organizations interested in engaging in similar efforts. Because the evaluation was begun as the foundation’s activities were winding down, it required creative design approaches.

This article uses the evaluation of the Orfalea Foundation’s initiative to provide a case example …