Event Dates:
October 14, 2025 – October 16, 2025
From October 14-16, 2025, we convened 120 learning, evaluation, strategy, and executive leaders from philanthropy at the Ford Foundation in New York City. This Evaluation Roundtable convened on the theme: Navigating Accountability for Systemic Impact in Philanthropy. Together, we explored two key questions:
What will it take for philanthropy to evaluate, measure, report on, and learn about systemic impact in ways that reflect the realities of complex systems change—diverse contexts, incremental progress, and long time horizons—while still offering meaningful insight and guidance?
How can those approaches also hold foundations accountable for how their resources, decisions, and efforts influence systems and contribute to or unintentionally work against social and environmental betterment?
Below are the materials from this convening, including the slide deck, the Ford Foundation teaching case, the framing paper, and the recording of Jewlya Lynn, our guest speaker.
You can find the slide decks for all three days here.
You can find the agenda for the 3-day convening here.
For this year’s convening, we set out to understand how the field was defining, grappling with, and living into their understandings and practices of accountability, systems change, and impact. We knew these were loaded words, so we wanted to ground our framing and convening in ways that acknowledged the nuanced and robust challenges, tensions, and opportunities philanthropy is facing. We conducted desk research, expert interviews, and 65 foundation interviews with 90 foundation staff. You can read our insights in our framing paper here.
In order to explore the intricate web of relationships, tradeoffs, and tensions that shape a foundation’s approach to navigating “accountability for systemic impact,” the 2025 Evaluation Roundtable’s teaching case featured The Ford Foundation and its groundbreaking Natural Resources and Climate Change International Strategy (NRCC-I). Launched in 2019 with a bold decade-long vision, this strategy aimed to ensure that the priorities of historically disadvantaged communities and land-connected peoples from the Global South–including Indigenous Peoples, Afro- descendant peoples, and rural communities–are reflected in policies and practices to advance climate justice globally.
This teaching case spotlights a pivotal moment—the 2023 evaluation of the strategy’s first four years—and how it supported collective reflection and adaptation within a multifaceted, international program. By exploring the Ford Foundation’s journey with the NRCC-I strategy evaluation and the insights gleaned from this recent review, the Evaluation Roundtable convening reflected on valuable lessons about the challenges and opportunities of measuring progress toward impact, fostering learning, and maintaining accountability in a complex, ever-evolving global landscape. The exploration helps us deepen our understanding of how foundations can effectively navigate the delicate balance between aspirational goals and real-world impact and accountability.
Read the full teaching case here.
On the third day of our convening, we were joined by Jewlya Lynn for a fireside chat on Exploring Future Directions for Evaluating Systemic Impact. Threading real-world experiences and stories with systems theory, Jewlya offered participants insights and provocations for how they might expand and grow their systems practice in line with their organization’s structures and mental models.
