Meet Our Partners: Andre Oliver

Engage R+D turns five this year. At this milestone, we’re reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning, where we’ve collectively made strides, and what the future of the fields of evaluation and philanthropy could look like. To help us think through what comes next, we are highlighting voices of our partners–funders and organizational leaders-charting the path. Andre Oliver is Initiative Director at the Irvine Foundation and leads the Fair Work initiative, which aims to expand the voice and influence of low-wage workers on the issues that affect their lives and livelihoods.

Tell us about your role and work.

I have run the Fair Work Initiative at the Irvine Foundation since 2018. It has been an extraordinary journey and I use that word intentionally. The organizations we support are centering the lives of workers, ensuring their rights are protected, and that low-income workers have a voice and seat at the table regarding their political and economic futures.

In what ways has learning and evaluation contributed to your work?

Something not unique to Irvine, but that has been tremendous, is that we center listening in our strategy development. A year and a half before the approval of the Fair Work initiative, we learned by doing: we offered robust grants to leaders in the workers’ rights ecosystem to support their efforts, share their perspectives, and lift up strategies to realize greater impact. Strategic listening remains an anchor in our work today, and Engage R+D has been a critical partner in living that set of values.

What shifts are you seeing in evaluation and/or philanthropy and what promise do those hold?

Let’s be frank. The term evaluation is a stress inducer. Philanthropy, engagement with boards—these things can cause more stress than foster light. We were very intentional in centering learning. We have two evaluations as part of the Fair Work Initiative, and they are by design developmental evaluations with learnings intended to inform the work of our partners as well as other external audiences. We did not want to center ourselves so taking a developmental approach was key. Increasingly, other initiative partners are looking to developmental evaluation to foster ongoing learning.

In terms of shifts in philanthropy, when we centered on what is currently our north star, that all Californians with low incomes can advance economically, we also shifted our operating model in terms of how we do grantmaking. We moved away from a traditional program model to a more flexible approach, with benchmarks for assessing how the work is having impact. Learning and evaluation allows for an adaptive strategy that is flexible and ongoing.

What do you hope to see shift even more and what might it take to get there?

Evaluation for the Fair Work initiative and for the Irvine Foundation plays an important role in the dynamism in which we are situated, whether you’re looking at politics, racial equity, gun violence, women’s reproductive rights, and other movements and policy areas. There have been dynamic shifts in context since 2020, and philanthropy needs to be considerably more responsive and strategic in real time. Learning and evaluation have helped us do that. 

What will keep us on this path is opening up the conversation, and we must keep going. Irvine’s board wants to understand: what is working, what is not, and what is a work in progress? Program staff wrestle with how to lift up what is not working, but we need to embrace the missteps and the works in progress as much as the successes, learn from them, and continue forward. Our learning partners play a critical role there, deepening the conversation with decision-makers to bring them closer to the realities of the work. Social change is a trajectory that is not transactional but is transformational.