Social change takes time, and it is never a linear process. It also happens within an ecosystem, and rarely comes down to a single grantee partner or foundation. If we are honest, change is entirely out of a foundation’s control. Despite all of this, funders continue to engage in evaluation as if the precision and volume of what we ask from grantees will improve our giving, and help improve lives.

While most of the philanthropy field continues down a business-as-usual evaluation path, a new approach to learning is rising — one that is rooted in trust, equity, and learning for impact.  Some funders are suspicious of this reimagined framework; many believe (falsely) that it is not concerned with outcomes or based in rigor. Few understand that it can hold the key to the long-term, systemic change that most of us are working toward.

Respectfully, those who are cynical about what this innovative approach offers do not fully understand its value. I know because I have been practicing trust-based philanthropy with rigor, impact, and strategy and measuring progress along the way.

I believe that if we funders were honest with ourselves, we would all agree that the old ways of working are not getting us to the place we need to reach as a sector, or as a society.  Before embarking on shaping this new framework, I too followed traditional approaches to learning and evaluation, for nearly two decades. I used the evaluation frameworks everyone else used, the same rigorous grant reports – not because they felt useful or right, but because that was the expectation.

I first joined Headwaters Foundation at a time in my life when, because of my growing discomfort with the role of funders of making change, I had started to wonder whether I should remain in philanthropy. Headwaters was a brand new health conversion foundation, and I was tasked with creating its structures from the ground up. It was an opportunity to reinvent how philanthropy does its work.

Taking the helm there proved to be the first time in my life that philanthropy felt rooted in the love of humanity instead of the foundation’s ego. When it came to evaluation, my work was about listening to communities and acting on what I was learning, not making grantees jump through structural hoops or report back in traditional ways. A new way of thinking about learning and evaluation began to take shape.

Headwaters and other trust-based foundations are experimenting with a fundamentally different approach to learning and evaluation rooted in three pillars:

  1. Learning for Accountability
  2. Learning for Decision-Making
  3. Learning for Long-Term Impact.

Read the full article about trust-based philanthropy by Brenda Solorzano at the Center for Effective Philanthropy.