Moving to Offense in a Time of Collapse: A Scenario Framework for the Future of Equity-Centered Philanthropy
This report explores four plausible futures for equity-centered philanthropy over the next decade, offering philanthropic leaders a way to navigate profound uncertainty without losing sight of long-term equity goals.
Learning: The Infrastructure Philanthropy Can’t Afford to Lose
When philanthropy abandons learning, it loses more than insight—it loses orientation. Learn why protecting and strengthening learning infrastructure is essential to philanthropy’s ability to act with both urgency and wisdom in moments of crisis.
A Framework for Embedding Learning in Systems Change
This five-step framework, developed and tested by a foundation, embeds learning in emergent systems change strategies. It prioritizes the testing of hypotheses and assumptions, uses learning questions, and calls for examining both confirming and disconfirming evidence.
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.
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.
Approaches to Learning Amid Crises: Reflections from Philanthropy
Explore how foundations’ approaches to learning shaped their responses to the crises of 2020. In interviews with seven foundations from Canada and the U.S. in the summer and fall of 2020, the authors applied the lens of organizational learning to how each of these foundations made sense of their reality, asked different kinds of questions to inform their thinking, and acted in new or different ways as a result.
5-A-Day: Learning By Force of Habit
Establishing a learning organization or culture is such a big goal that it can overwhelm our ability to act on it. This piece, published on Medium, explores how building learning habits into common routines makes it more manageable, and creates small wins that can lead to big change. Focusing on habits ensures that learning is not a separate activity, but rather is integrated into our day-to-day work.
Precipitating Events and Rewards in Making a Habit of Learning
Better habits around learning are critical to improving philanthropic practice. This piece looks at what needs to happen before and after habit change to make a new way of working stick.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: The Consequences of Small Failures in Learning
It was the worst U.S. maritime disaster in three decades, involving an experienced captain with a reputation for safety. This article, published on Medium, explains went wrong and what it can teach us about the often-overlooked factors that affect our learning and decisions.
Evaluation Coaching: Light Up Your Client’s Expertise
The practice of coaching is gaining momentum in the evaluation profession, and more evaluators are including it in their skill set. This brief introduces the use of coaching in evaluation capacity building, and provides principles and three tools for integrating coaching into evaluation practice.