Across the country, we have seen organizations walking back their commitments to racial equity—the same ones they made just a few years ago—as retributive fear of the current administration pervades the philanthropic learning and evaluation field. Despite this, many organizations are still moving forward in their commitment to equity and justice, both explicitly and implicitly.
At the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI), we steward the Evaluation Roundtable—a network of learning and evaluation leaders from more than 150 foundations and a leading-edge platform for peer learning. A key part of this work is organizing and influencing philanthropic norms and philosophies around learning and evaluation.
Since an organizational strategy refresh in 2019, CEI has explicitly included racial equity among our core values. It infuses our sense of purpose and contributed to two regional communities of practice (CoP) we convened between 2022 and 2024, focusing on foundations based in the U.S. South. Building on our 2021 Evaluation Roundtable theme, “What It Was, What It Is, Who We Are Becoming,” we focused on the question:
How can we come together as grantmakers to shift practice so that our strategy, learning, and evaluation efforts advance racial equity and justice?
This and related questions guided the CoPs, which facilitated peer connections to unlock learning and action, foster racial equity practices, and build trust to enable more candid and context-specific conversations.
We convened each CoP six times over six months following a three-part arc that covered the past, present, and future of racial equity and justice in participating foundations and the role learning and evaluation played in supporting it:
- Where we have been: How is it that our field has been shaped by both oppression and liberation? What stories are we told about our foundation’s history?
- Where we are now: How have I been trying to help realize racial equity in evaluation and learning in my foundation?
- Where we are going: What is our vision for the future? How might we cultivate it? How can each of our foundations lead positive change?
Participants arrived at each session personally committed and professionally determined to have challenging conversations about aligning their work with their values and pushing philanthropy toward more racially equitable and just practices.
Peer-to-peer learning was the key ingredient in these CoPs. Coming together in intentional, structured, and relational ways made sparks of new thinking and ideas for small experiments possible. As conveners, here’s what we learned:
Peer learning can help make system dynamics and histories visible.
Philanthropic evaluation practices carry deep histories, belief systems, and norms that are often unseen and can undermine racial equity and justice goals. Yet we rarely have the time and structured opportunities to reflect on the how and why of our organizations’ practices. Peer learning communities provide that structured time, bringing together similarly positioned people to grapple with organizational histories and the embedded mental models that accompany them.
For example, in one of the regional CoPs we convened, the idea of ghost structures emerged as a core tension and dynamic driving—or rather, halting—organizations’ racial equity progress. Ghost structures are the invisible, historical ways of operating that persist even after an organization has attempted to change course. They shape how organizations operate every day. These structures might take the form of founder mindsets, family governance structures, or original values—all things that many foundations have overtly left behind yet continue to guide internal operations in unspoken ways. In the CoP, one foundation described how they’d removed all family ties from their board of directors but questioned whether that had actually changed how the organization operates or whether practices and values of past members lingered, influencing the current board.
Peer learning created the conditions to make this critical system dynamic visible. Having the opportunity to hear from others about what the dynamic can look like enabled participants to see these ghost structures in their own organizations. In making them visible, conversations around decision making became clearer. Because participants were in conversation with one another, had built trust among themselves, and were similarly situated in their own organizations, when one person named the ghost structure they were working in, others were able to interrogate their own contexts and work together in real-time.
Shared contexts help participants identify areas for action.
For learning and evaluation practitioners in philanthropy, advancing foundations’ work toward racial equity and justice can be fraught with uncertainty. Where do you start? Where do you have power or leverage? What is actually possible? Peer learning communities can help answer those questions by creating structured opportunities to see what others are doing (or have tried) within similar institutions and from similar roles, and what they’ve learned from their specific contexts.
For example, in our regional CoPs, participants came from their own unique organizations but discovered that they were navigating similar organizational dynamics in addition to the shared regional histories, political contexts, and cultures. Together, they identified common challenges, like the political climate around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) commitments in the South, building trust and connection in their communities, and practicing real-time learning to support the systems change they’re working toward. In sharing these contexts, they were also able to think together about what was possible. Participants shared what they had done in the past to move racial equity and justice forward from their learning and evaluation positioning. For example:
- Involving community members in learning and evaluation activities and processes fostered trust and created collective knowledge about how to navigate local issues;
- Prioritizing org-wide learning about power dynamics and racial equity for foundation staff enabled staff to see these patterns in their everyday work and processes;
- Establishing learning communities and training sessions on equitable and culturally relevant evaluation practices equipped staff with the same set of skills to practice equity in their evaluation work.
Members of the CoP offered to support and collaborate on experiments they wanted to try in the future, such as:
- Exploring innovative methods to communicate evaluation findings with community members—like through community events—to ensure knowledge is accessible to the people who need it;
- Developing fair compensation policies for evaluation participants to demonstrate the value of their time and expertise;
- Facilitating regular values-alignment sessions to reflect on and continue pairing values with everyday and organizational behaviors;
- Designing an impact framework that operationalizes equity and centers it in decision making as a reminder of what they are continually working toward.
Learning and evaluation teams are uniquely positioned in foundations to advance organizational change, and yet specific leverage points and power can be hard to locate alone. Peer learning, especially communities of practice, brings together a combination of people who come from unique organizations that often have shared contexts. Coming together to explore these contexts can help ease a sense of loneliness and spark inspiration and insights that would be harder to access alone.
Peer learning is itself a change strategy.
Learning and evaluation staff in foundations often work alone or are part of smaller departments, while tasked with stretching and shapeshifting across the organization to meet diverse programming and operational needs. A consistent theme emerged in the CoPs: we cannot do this work alone, and knowing who our allies are is critical. As participants explored their contextual challenges, they repeatedly surfaced how much their ability to move forward on racial equity and justice goals relied on others.
Working to advance racial equity and justice in these contexts is even more challenging when you’re trying to do it alone. In our CoPs, the peer structure itself became a form of organizing, relying on us coming together as a collective. This collective developed shared norms and community agreements to guide how we showed up. Participants developed shared norms and community agreements, co-created timelines of their organizations’ histories, and built visions for the future that required mutual accountability across institutions.
Peer learning, as an organizing practice, disrupts our isolated ways of working and emboldens participants to experiment with new practices, challenge inherited norms, and build toward a shared vision. Individually, learning and evaluation practitioners can’t change the field-level norms that keep our systems stuck in place. Peer learning—combined with the opportunities learning and evaluation have to influence how organizations think and learn about our most complex issues—provides one structure to connect individuals to the greater field.
Advancing racial equity and justice is not a solo endeavor; it requires learning with one another as we build something better together.