Resources

ACT for Alexandria, a community foundation in Alexandria, VA, is developing a capacity building cohort focused on racial equity for nonprofit leaders in our community. We are curious about any of your experiences with similar initiatives.

I’d like to know what software or other systems foundations are using to track grantee outcomes and impact.

The Scranton Area Community Foundation will be hosting a Learning Conference in the Fall, and we are looking for a keynote speaker. In particular, we are looking for someone to speak on "Becoming a Learning Organization" or similarly related topic.

The brief introduces the "Engaging Boards and Trustees in Strategic Learning: Toolkit" for board members.

The Executive Summary introduces the "Engaging Boards and Trustees in Strategic Learning: Toolkit."

The fields of strategic learning and evaluation have also grown and shifted over the last decade, and new ways of thinking about and evaluating grantmaking and its impacts have emerged. This paper responds to these changes and provides a fresh outlook and set of resources for grantmaker CEOs, evaluation staff, and senior leaders to use to engage their boards and trustees in strategic learning. Our hope is that staff and leaders use any or all of the ten tools we have developed to help board members and trustees understand what strategic learning is (and isn’t), why it is important, and how to better incorporate strategic learning practices into their work.

In addition to advancing EDI in our own work and that of our grant partners, we want to share learnings from the Diversity in Theater initiative with the broader theater community and other funders working at the intersection of arts and social justice. Have you taken on a similar learning, evaluation, and field-building initiative at your foundation? If so, would you be willing to share your process and approach with us, including potential pitfalls to avoid and opportunities to explore?

I am interested in any frameworks or tools, best practices or top three tips for doing focus groups well while respecting the community's time.

Hello all, We have just completed an amazing year of learning and personal development as a staff (adaptive leadership, racial equity, crucial conversations and facilitation for accountability), and we are ready for more! What trainings have your organizations supported for your staff?? What recommendations would you make for our next year of personal development trainings? All the best, Melanie

Hello GEO Members, The McGregor Fund is interested in hearing from other funders that offer grants (either in addition to programmatic funding, or as stand-alone grants) for grantee evaluation capacity and/or data infrastructure. These grants might support evaluation consultants, or experts in data management or data system acquisition. They might support training to strengthen grantee data collection, evaluation, or performance measurement. In my scan of GEO archives and the web so far, I have found numerous foundations that fund research, or evaluation of the impact of their funding, and some who fund IT infrastructure, but less that are focused on building grantee capacity to better manage and use their data to inform programmatic and strategic decision-making. If you know of any funders that do this, or do something similar yourself, I would love to hear from you, and am curious about how these grant opportunities are assessed by staff, and any reflections on the value of these grants.