Anniversaries and year-end reflections are always a great time to take stock and express gratitude, especially after weathering many storms. It seems fitting that wood and trees are elements for commemorating five-year anniversaries - a symbol of durability, wisdom, and strong roots. As founders of Engage R+D, we have been reflecting on that metaphor of wood and what durability means in the context of our work. As we end 2022, those reflections are also catalysts for the future. 

This fall, we continue to reflect on our role in using evaluation and learning to advance equity and transform systems. We are grateful to partner with and learn from leaders working toward critical shifts in society, to collaborate with the incredible people who make up our team, and for the opportunity to support meaningful projects across diverse issue areas and communities.

by Ali Miller and Qiana Wallace

Building capacity might look like investing in training, supporting alignment with best practices, or hiring “experts.” But what if there’s another way? Working with The TK Foundation’s nonprofit youth program grantees, we realized we could do something different. So we intentionally centered equity by using a co-design model to create the capacity-building program in partnership with grantees. Here are our notes on what worked and what we learned about creating an inclusive program model, centering trust, sharing power, and engaging youth.

by Pilar Mendoza and Clare Nolan

Ending mass incarceration in the United States is no small feat. The scale and complexity of the challenge both creates and demands a diversity of thought and ideas. Our evaluation of the Ford Foundation’s strategy to end mass incarceration surfaced a number of insights for funders and other stakeholders about how to navigate across differences when advancing change strategies.

by Clare Nolan, Erika Takada, Pilar Mendoza, Ali Miller, and Meghan Hunt

Starting Smart and Strong is the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s kindergarten readiness strategy to build, test, and scale up community-driven solutions in three California communities. These communities have each gone through evolutions in their practices and adaptations to best support young learners, evolutions that follow five phases of scale we have documented through our long-term evaluation of this effort. The phases provide a framework to reflect on lessons and implications broadly relevant to systems change efforts that involve scaling.

by Cristina Whyte

At Engage R+D, we partner with nonprofits and their funders on several communities of practice across the country – in some cases as the facilitator and in other cases as the evaluator. The stakes are high, with organizations and individuals giving their time and expertise, learning and listening with peers, and aiming to build their own practices, and their field. How are these communities building connection and deepening shared learning around tough issues in a virtual environment? Looking across these diverse communities, we have identified five helpful facilitation practices.

by Clare Nolan, Cristina Whyte, and Anna Saltzman

We believe that evaluation and learning (E&L) leaders have the potential to be extraordinary and make critical contributions to equity and justice in our current transformative moment. But to do so, they need knowledge, tools, encouragement, and support. With this in mind, we are excited to release Evaluation and Learning at Foundations: A Field Guide geared towards helping E&L leaders working in philanthropy navigate their dynamic and complex roles.

by Michael Matsunaga and Kimberly Braxton

As evaluators, from Fall 2020 to Spring 2021 we spoke with national, state, and local early learning practitioners, advocates, and state system leaders on behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help identify ways to rebuild early learning into a system that is better able to withstand shocks to its operations.

by Anna Saltzman

Our Engage R+D team recently held a learning session where we explored our experiences and impacts working across communities that were new to us. We discussed the challenges of working in different contexts, strategies for building connection and trust, and overall lessons learned. That conversation showed how much evaluators can and should learn through place-based inquiries at the outset of a project.

by Kimberly Braxton and Pilar Mendoza

Every day we deal with “polarities,” or dynamic tensions, in our work, personal lives, and broader society, yet we may not always notice them or recognize them as such. As two organizations committed to deepening our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practice, Equal Measure and Engage R+D recently embarked on a joint learning experience to explore some common polarities that exist in our work and organizational cultures. Polarity thinking can prompt us to increase our awareness about values that may be in tension with one another and which ones are being prioritized. In this blog, we share some of what we learned.

by Clare Nolan and Christina Garcia

What might it look like to design and commission evaluation differently? In this new case study, we describe the design charrette process in detail. Drawing on this experience, here are four ideas for how funders can increase the value of evaluation for grantees and others with potential to benefit from the knowledge they generate.