Meet Our Partners: Tracy Van Slyke

Engage R+D turns five this year and to celebrate we’re reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning, including in conversation with our partners. Tracy Van Slyke is the Chief Strategy Officer at the Pop Culture Collaborative, a donor collaborative that organizes and deploys resources to support the pop culture narrative change field—led by and centering Black and Indigenous peoples, people of color, immigrants and refugees, and Muslim peoples, especially those who are women, queer, trans, nonbinary, and/or disabled—to transform narrative oceans and build narrative power at scale.

Tell us about your role and the issues you seek to address through your work.

It’s important to underscore the words “transform narrative oceans.” As our CEO Bridgit Antoinette Evans says, our work is not to change a narrative on a particular issue but to,  “embrace the hard work of transforming whole narrative oceans.”

Measuring one project at a time to understand transformation is inefficient. As Dimple Abichandani, former Executive Director of the General Service Foundation has noted, “If we’re trying to transform the ocean, why are we measuring the drop?”

Our North Star is to support a field capable of seeding new narrative oceans, in order to build the yearning in a true majority of Americans to co-create a just and pluralist society where everyone belongs and is treated as such. To help make that vision real, we have moved nearly $25 million of investment over the last six years into the pop culture narrative change field by prioritizing support for two critical areas. The first, Narrative Infrastructure, is the leadership, intelligence, collaboration, power, innovation, and community building that builds narrative power. The second, Narrative Immersion, refers to the narrative ocean of content and experiences that normalize new realities, behaviors, and identities that millions of people are immersed in every day. 

I oversee half of our grantmaking portfolio, lead multiple field organizing and expansion programs, and manage our impact and evaluation work.  

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

Part of Pop Culture Collab’s mandate is to support a community of funders to learn about how to resource narrative change, especially how to support BIPOC artists and BIPOC-centered social justice movements within entertainment industries like Hollywood.  And learning is core to our DNA. How we learn internally, and then how we translate those learnings to actionable insights for field members and philanthropy are important pedestals of our work.

Our learnings come from our constant internal evaluation and analysis. And as we were entering our fifth year, Engage R+D helped us look back at if and how our narrative infrastructure grantmaking to date had contributed to the growth of the pop culture narrative change field. They sought to help us uncover: What has the Collaborative's narrative infrastructure grantmaking made possible within our grantee partners’ organizations, teams, and projects? What might the Collaborative do differently in the future to better serve our individual grantee partners and the field?  

With Engage R+D’s great work, we learned that the Collaborative’s support had a major impact on the development of the field’s leadership and capacity, while also supporting their own ability to learn and gather. We also gained insights that are encouraging us to explore participatory grantmaking in the future, a strategy that had already been percolating as a core strategy to investigate over the past few years. This process helped us further hone our grantmaking strategies and pass along key learnings to our philanthropic peers.

For example, I recently translated these insights into a new essay, “Want Narrative Power? Invest in Narrative Infrastructure,” and the development of an accompanying philanthropic tool for funders seeking to explore or expand their narrative infrastructure grantmaking.

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

We are seeing a more nuanced understanding of how long-term narrative change needs to be evaluated. Shorter-term evaluation—specifically tracking, learning, and analysis—is critical to designing and iterating a culture change strategy. In contrast, evaluation of a transformative, long-term narrative strategy that has been activated by a cross-sector narrative change field encompasses a longitudinal, multi-pronged approach.

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

The thing we need to do more of, flat out, is invest in evaluation.

We ask for evaluation metrics but are not funding grantees to conduct evaluation. Useful evaluation requires expert capacity. Evaluation that is appropriate to the narrative change field requires even more specific insights into how this field and strategy works. As we are grantmaking, we need to figure out how to support field members’ narrative strategy work and robust evaluation capacity. 

Second, it’s critical for philanthropy to understand the impact of the work, not just for the sake of evaluation, but to support the field to understand if they are making the change in the world they seek. But currently, narrative change funders and field members do not currently share a collective understanding of *what* impact analysis and corresponding evaluation metrics are most fundamental to use. That’s why we are working with the USC Norman Lear Center to develop a shared impact framework for funders and field members that can both track and pull learnings from specific initiatives as well as conduct comprehensive field-wide, long-term impact evaluation around our shared work. 

You can follow Tracy and the Collaborative on Instagram @popcollab.