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Evaluation Roundtable

Resources

  • Publication

Building Power That’s Enduring, Not Episodic: Learnings From the Culture & Community Power Fund

How do marginalized communities build systemic power that is enduring rather than merely episodic? For many grassroots organizers, the answer is deeply rooted in culture.
  • Publication

Moving to Offense in a Time of Collapse: A Scenario Framework for the Future of Equity-Centered Philanthropy

  • Publication

Learning-Oriented Accountability: How the Ford Foundation Navigates Impact & Social Justice

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  • Insight

Gazing inward as we align with our values

CEI is shifting how we approach our benchmarking research on learning and evaluation in philanthropy so that it can better support the sector’s efforts to advance racial equity and justice.
  • Publication

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.
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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.
A black and white photo of street graffiti under a bridge that reads "Let's love our community"
  • Insight

Community in Philanthropy: What it is, why we need it, and how we can build it

If we are to meet justice, then we need to hold ourselves accountable in an environment that asks very little of us, and to support and encourage each other when our surroundings try to pull us back toward a status quo.
  • Publication

A Tool for Systems Change that Supports Learning in Foundations

Foundations are systems. They have their own cultures and related assumptions, norms, standards, and practices. We encourage foundations to take stock of their learning needs with a dispassionate (evaluative) look at themselves as systems and how people work within them.
  • Insight

Toward a Trust-Based Framework for Learning and Evaluation

What if we reimagined evaluation as an opportunity for funders to learn and evolve as stewards, rather than taking on the narrow–and virtually impossible–task of proving that limited grants make a measurable impact on longstanding, complex social issues?
  • Insight

How To Center Equity in Measurement, Learning, & Evaluation

NationSwell convened a panel of experts to talk about how organizations should think about equity when engaging with measurement, learning, and evaluation.
  • Publication

Lost Causal: Debunking Myths About Causal Analysis in Philanthropy

Causal analysis is not just for controlled programmatic work, it is also for dynamic and emergent strategies that include network building, field building, advocacy, organizing, or movements.
  • Publication

We need to articulate our assumptions so that we can test them. Here’s a guide to help.

This four-page guidance defines assumptions, explains why it is critical to articulate them, and then offers a set of prompting questions to help elicit them. Examples are included.
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  • Publication

Holding Foundations Accountable for Equity Commitments

Philanthropy needs to transform the structures and processes through which foundations hold power, including how they conceive of and operationalize accountability through their approaches to strategy development, evaluation, and grantee reporting and monitoring.
  • Publication

How Far Dare an Evaluator Go Toward Saving the World?

This article offers raw qualitative data as a supplement to the 2021 article authored by Michael Quinn Patton and published in the American Journal of Evaluation titled: "How Far Dare an Evaluator Go Toward Saving the World? Redux, Update, and a Reflective Practice Facilitation Tool."
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  • Publication

Policy Wins Aren’t Enough; We Need Advocacy that Builds Power

While getting policy wins and systems changes is important, what does it mean to center impacted communities as the drivers of change? What does it mean to make building their power the ultimate goal of advocacy work? What does it require of the broader ecosystem of advocacy actors who also are involved in the work? CEI's evaluation report of The California Endowment's Building Healthy Communities initiative explores these questions and more.
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