Learning Habits for Equity
A complement to a previous CEI resource on five essential learning habits, this brief shows how these learning habits (making thinking visible, asking powerful questions, combating biases, attending to causal inference, answering the now what question) can be used to help advance equity.
Evolution not Revolution: Strategy, Learning, and Evaluation in The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative
This teaching case focuses on how learning and evaluation can guide those in philanthropy seeking to rise to the demands of more inclusive approaches to social change, especially with communities that have been historically marginalized.
On Equity in Contracting with Small and Solo Local Evaluation Firms: An Open Letter to Funders
Standard funding and contracting practices often stand in the way of success for small, solo, and local firms. This open letter to funders explores the strengths of these firms and their roadblocks, and offers recommendations for creating the conditions for them to thrive.
2023 Benchmarking Foundation Learning & Evaluation Practices
The most comprehensive review of evaluation and learning practices at foundations, this report offers benchmarking data on foundation learning and evaluation practices collected in 2023.
Using Developmental Evaluation to Support Adaptive Strategies: An Application from a Social Change Initiative
The chapter, authored by and written from the perspective of both strategists and evaluators, describes the methods used, how the evaluation informed strategy, and reections and lessons on the developmental evaluation experience and approach.
Supporting Advocacy Ecosystems to Build Power
Organizers need the support of other actors—professional advocates, think tanks and policy shops, researchers, communications firms, funders, evaluators, and others—to recognize the critical role of organizing and to share the long-term goal of building people power.
Amplifying Nonprofit Voices: Bridging the Advocacy Evaluation Gap
To better understand advocates’ perspectives and bridge the gap between their evaluation needs and the field of evaluation practice, this research surveyed U.S. nonprofit advocates and recommends six ways that the advocacy evaluation field can shift toward more advocate-focused practice.
Toward Power-Shifting Solidarity with Black-Led Change
This research considers the question: What will it take for institutional philanthropy in MN and beyond to move at the speed of courage and invest wholly in Black lives?
Advocacy that Builds Parents’ Power
CEI partnered with the Center on the Ecology of Early Development to evaluate two projects that supported state policy advocates in advancing equity by centering parents in their early childhood advocacy efforts. This report offers findings on the approach states used, the progress they made, and the barriers they encountered.
How to do Process Tracing: A Method for Testing “How Change Happened” in Complex and Dynamic Settings
Process tracing is a causal methodology that can help us to understand how change actually happened within a complex dynamic environment.