Expanding the Scope of Trust-Based Philanthropy: How Funders are Helping Reshape Learning & Evaluation

To make real, transformative progress toward a just future, we must trust and learn from communities who are best positioned to identify and craft solutions for the issues they face.

We believe in relational community building with partners within nonprofits and movements, and seek to shift power away from philanthropy and toward social justice leaders and organizations.

One area where philanthropy has held on tightest to power and control over community partners is through the commissioning and use of evaluation data. Traditionally, evaluation has been commissioned and used by funders to determine the “effectiveness” of nonprofits and social movements, holding grantees to exacting and often unreasonable funder-derived standards.

In the series, we will provide an overview of how F4ICA is reshaping learning and evaluation in our own efforts, followed by a case study of how we’ve partnered with community advisors to ensure L&E informs community-driven grantmaking. We will wrap up the series sharing practical steps and tools for peers in philanthropy interested in reimagining L&E at their own institution.

We are excited to share these insights and tools with the philanthropic community to shift the power dynamic of traditional learning and evaluation efforts.

Stay tuned for the next post in the series in August 2022, and follow the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project blog for more stories and insights on shifting power imbalances in philanthropy.