Building Power Through Birth Justice
Lessons from RWJF’s efforts in advancing health equity by centering BIPOC-led birth justice organizations
Building Power Through Local Base Building
Lessons from RWJF’s Investment in Multi-Issue Organizing for Racial and Health Equity
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.
Making Visible Philanthropy’s Hidden and Conflicting Mental Models for Systems Change
When we don’t make our mental models visible, we risk undermining our efforts. We see two mental models for systems change being used in philanthropic sector—the systems dynamics mental model and the systems emergence mental model.
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.
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.
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.
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.