Meet Our Partners: Krista Scott

At Engage R+D we are constantly reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning in partnership with our colleagues in evaluation, philanthropy, and community organizations. In this interview, Krista Star Scott, Senior Program Officer of Strategic Portfolios at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), shares her perspectives on how emergent learning and evaluation support the Value of Caregivers initiative, a multi-year effort to shift narratives about the value and critical importance of caregivers in our society.

Tell us about the Value of Caregivers initiative and how narrative change aligns with the mission of RWJF.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation works to transform systems change by identifying and confronting structural barriers to health and wellbeing—including race and gender and disability/ability status—so that we can get to health equity faster and together. The Healthy Children and Families portfolio, which houses the Value of Caregivers initiative, focuses on advancing an inclusive economy where children and families have the resources they need to thrive. I’ll share how our understanding of narratives about children and families has evolved—a shift that led to the development of this initiative.

In Healthy Children and Families, we often felt the push and pull between centering children and centering their families. I think this is true for many organizations and grant making institutions that want to center children: we invest in the child and wait for those investments to “pay off.” Sometimes we think about “fixing” the environments they are in, or taking them out of “bad” ones and putting them into “good” or “better” ones.

Our team had a hunch that those assumptions are missing something big—a structural frame and the acknowledgement that many children and families are doing great things, but don’t have the resources to overcome the many deep, historic, and often unseen barriers they face. Heck, we don’t even really talk about family care unless it’s in relationship to work and engaging in the economic system!

So we began an exploration to understand who is talking about care and caregiving from a family perspective. What we learned is that when we think about caregiving, we think about professionalized care. But there was a paucity of narratives about caregiving in families. For instance, there is often a very limited view of a family as composed of two parents of opposite genders or sexes—the nuclear family. We also learned that this traditional narrative around children and families is not reality. To counter that mindset, we wanted to elevate narratives that reflect realities about caregiving and families in this country—which is that for many people and cultures, care within families is collective, and is a birthright. That narrative is in line with RWJF’s mission.

What are the big takeaways or key learnings from this work? How has evaluation and emergent learning supported the initiative’s evolution?

We’ve learned from our Value of Caregivers grantees that creating change requires communicating many narratives to many audiences through many channels, over and over again. I believe our job as a funder is to develop the skills and fund the infrastructure of organizations to shift narratives.

I think evaluation and emergent learning helps the funder and its grantees understand how impact is happening, where they might need to pivot, and to understand what works and what doesn’t—towards long-term goals anchored in values and justice. Through the Value of Caregivers initiative, emergent learning helped us understand that there are multiple frameworks you can invest in, based on who you are trying to influence. In fact, you have to make investments in multiple approaches and messages to multiple audiences if you want to be successful. It’s not duplicative. It’s “surround sound.” It’s a pathway to lead many people with different values towards your big idea or goal.

Another thing we learned is that if we want people who have faced structural discrimination to support a policy solution or practice, they must believe they are worthy of having good things, that our tax dollars should be for them and that they have a right to them. Many don’t, because everywhere we look, we see evidence that our stories, and policies, tell us they don’t. There’s an important amount of narrative change that must happen first within the individual and then among those individuals in their communities. People must share their stories among themselves before they can tell those in power, or with power, what they need.

What approaches for advancing equity have you explored in this initiative? Where are you gaining traction or seeing promising results?

We have grounded much of our Healthy Children and Families work in what we learned through a collaboration with our Communications colleagues on Every Family Forward. Every Family Forward conducted listening sessions to understand how families were doing in this country, starting before the pandemic and continuing through the pandemic. We leveraged what we heard from cross-sections of parents and families—disaggregated by race, socioeconomic status, geography, and other factors—as we developed priorities for the portfolio. And from there, we drilled down to the expressed needs of those facing the most structural discrimination, including racism.

As we were thinking about what our narrative work could look like, we had an “ah-hah moment.” We recognized that the laws and policies of this country disincentivize people who come from, or have developed, cultures of collective care from practicing those traditions. So in addition to saying there are narratives about the value and commonality of care, there are ways to talk about, from a cultural perspective, the deep histories of love and care to express belonging in this country. These expressions have often been marginalized or silenced.

This understanding inspired us to fund projects, like the Value of Caregivers, to facilitate narratives that elevate the culture and history of collective care practices. If we just focused on talking about caregiving as a race-neutral or gender-neutral conversation, we’d never have an opportunity to uplift the culture-based collective approach. And as we talk about expanded definitions of families and chosen family, we’ve also been able to understand the impacts of parentage laws on queer families in ways that expand what we consider as family caregiving, so that we can make sure everybody is included in laws and policies that facilitate caregiving based on gender identity as well. 

Based on what you’ve learned from this work, what words of wisdom would you share with others seeking to advance equitable practices in learning, evaluation, and narrative change?

I’d like to encourage folks to remember that testing narratives is good. You want to know what’s happening based on what you are saying. But it’s important to note that what’s happening is only a mile marker and is not an indicator of success.

I also believe that culture change is not linear. We won’t see the impacts of this work for a while. But we take the learning from this work to paint a larger picture, to show our progress towards the whole.

More about the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s support for caregivers can be found here and in the phase one Value of Caregivers initiative evaluation report here.