Learning

Increasingly, grantmakers are facilitating their own learning, by convening in funder learning groups and acting within their own institutions to promote useful evidence and foster the use of evidence in policy and practice settings.

Guidance statements that lay out principles for the ethics and design of more democratic research activities are a start. But the most urgent challenge is to ensure that production and use is fundamentally inclusive, particularly for those most affected by the issues that research evidence seeks to address. Equally important is the ongoing learning to ground principles in concrete examples of use.

Here we provide articles, tools, and examples to support grantmakers in taking up these learning challenges.

Guidance on Evidence Generation and Use

Democratizing Evidence in Education Strategies for Philanthropy:

Members of this funders group developed strategies for philanthropists to push on the boundaries that have held evidence in the hands of the few. Strategies include:

  • Facilitating equitable, representative, and meaningful engagement

  • Dismantling cultural, institutional, and methodological barriers

  • Addressing conditions that make evidence inaccessible

  • Maintaining a high priority focus on racial equity and inclusion

  • Making the case for how evidence serves the public good

Open Letter from the Data for Black Lives Movement:

Open letter to Facebook outlines steps to ensure that data are used as a positive tool for social change. These steps are instructive for all entities seeking to use data in pursuit of racial justice and equity.

Catalogue of Civic Use Cases:

This regularly updated catalog of public data uses cases, providing several examples from the youth-serving and human services fields.

What's the Role of Equity in Evaluation Policy?:

This report outlines the elements of applying an equity lens to federal evaluation guidelines: rethinking rigor, relevance, and utility;, addressing issues of independence and transparency, and ethics;. acknowledging the potent role evidence plays in federal evidence-based policymaking and; raising important questions about how the evidence that shapes federal policy gets generated and used.

Co-Learning Webinar

Webinar transcript and PPT featuring co-learning opportunities for funders:

Building Evidence with a Health Equity Lens: Webinar for grantmakers in health on grantmaking and evaluation with an equity lens. The PowerPoint highlights the instrumental supports grantmakers promote to ensure inclusive engagement in evaluation processes.

Self Study Resources for Grantmakers

Self-initiated learning can begin with one of the growing number of guides that help ground grantmaker practices in core principles of inclusion and equity:


Why Am I Always Being Researched?

This 100-plus page guide supports funders with specific language and examples. Guidance specific to funders starts on page 84. Charts communicate key approaches and concepts simply (for examples, see pages 90 and 102 -- digestible formats that can be shared).

Sample considerations for funders include:

P. 85: RFP Processes and Grantee Support

Funders should consider the following processes:

  • Change the research questions you are willing to fund.

  • Issue RFPs for research differently or guide and evaluate your evaluators differently.

  • Engage with board and staff on internal processes and biases, especially relating to how you use data.

  • Interrogate numbers and stories you lift up, and use different framing in what you publish.

P. 89: Diversify Methods that Receive Support

Funders can prompt discussion of possible approaches and methods:

  • What ongoing benefits could the community organization see after the research ends?

  • Can you connect the community organization to another organization that has gone through the type of research being considered?

P. 93: Revise budgets and incentives

Funders can ask whether budgets and timelines support and create incentives for:

  • Building relationships and trust?

  • Developing data tools with community participation?

  • Researchers and the community organization interpreting the data together?

We need to do a much better job of naming the belief systems which our work privileges, whose knowledge matters most, and why, at the end of the day, we do this work at all.

- Reflection on the 2018 American Evaluation Association National Conference, from Equitable Evaluation Initiative

Balancing the Portfolio: From Self-Facilitated Learning to Funding Strategies

Most grantmakers acknowledge that the vast majority of research grant funding is awarded to white scholars. Many funders have pursued careers in philanthropy to address such imbalances. But tacit understanding cannot replace a systematic review of grantmaking activities and priorities. The William T. Grant Foundation's internal audit of their grantmaking investments demonstrated what they already knew -- researchers of color, often not connected into more privileged networks, were starkly underrepresented.

This internal knowledge presented an opportunity for self-reflective institutional learning. That institutional learning bore fruit in several areas of the foundation's work: adopting routine data collection on the racial background of their grantee applicant pool; rethinking the racial composition of reviewers and recruiting more reviewers of color; expanding technical assistance supports to promising applicants of color; engaging in intentional outreach strategies to publicize funding opportunities to networks that reach academics of color; making grants to strengthen the pipeline of young scholars of color; and reviewing internal foundation processes to ensure they do not perpetuate inequalities in the grantee portfolio. These efforts have led to an expanded mentoring program praised by grantees and others in the field; a demonstrable increase in the funding rate for PIs of color; and the allocation of more grant dollars to pipeline activities to support scholars of color.

Philanthropists' self-initiated learning can be tremendously productive when it shows up in revised and improved processes including the RFP process; pre-application engagement and technical assistance; the content and composition of grantee convenings; the nature of grantmakers' communications; and the increased dedication of resources to researchers and communities from underrepresented backgrounds and those that bring new perspectives and methodologies. Vivian Tseng, Senior Vice President, discussed the importance of institutional learning for funders: "What we have learned as a foundation has informed several of our initiatives. For example, we got into research-practice partnerships because there are stakeholders that have not been part of defining the research agenda. It has also informed our funding for rapid response grants, democratizing evidence, and our critical theory lens on understanding the use of research. We are not done, and we are committed to continuing to learn and improve."