Funders Together to End Homelessness, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), PEAK Grantmaking, and Southern California Grantmakers (SCG) have been on a journey of self-reflection and situational assessment to explore principles from the Equitable Evaluation Framework™(EEF) and consider long-standing beliefs and assumptions in our learning and evaluation practices that show up as orthodoxies.

Together, we launched the Making the Case Collaboratory in February of this year learning opportunity to learn more about the Equitable Evaluation Initiative™, we shared news of this partnership and learning opportunity. Our commitment to our membership was to document and share our discoveries, and our hope for other philanthropy-serving organizations (PSOs) is for this collaborative to serve as a model for PSOs to reimagine not only collaboration on racial equity work and learning opportunities for their members but ideally individual and organizational transformation and greater alignment.

Over six months, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative team led three intensive learning sessions that bookended monthly peer coaching calls, during which champions from each of the four PSOs learned alongside twenty-one of our members. During these calls, the Equitable Evaluation Initiative team pushed us to uncover and understand assumptions in how we currently think about evaluation while a graphic facilitator, Emily Shepherd, used visuals to reflect our thinking and questions back to us.

In between the three, four-hour sessions led by the Equitable Evaluation Initiative team, the four organizing PSOs met and shared our reflections with each other. Though we are four different PSOs, we are dedicated to finding ways to collaborate, especially given an overlap in our membership. To that end, we asked ourselves, “What are the assumptions and key questions that underpin our vision for our work?”

In our conversations, we asked each other:

  • What do we currently measure and evaluate, and why? What does that tell us about our values, relationships, voice, and power?
  • How do we shift our internal learning and evaluation to better align with our missions and values and be in service of equity?
  • How do we shift philanthropic culture so that evaluation is in service of equity and reflects equity in its process?

Read the full article about collaboration in racial equity work byStephanie Chan at PEAK Grantmaking.