Our Theory of Change: Learning and Evolving in Partnership Toward Health Equity
March 2023
We consider ourselves a learning foundation and use the knowledge we gain from our grantee partners to reflect on and continuously evolve our grantmaking strategies and processes.
So, what guides and informs our grantmaking approach, specifically our general operating support? What have we learned? What do we do with those learnings?
Our recent insights report, Aligning Our Walk with Our Talk, begins to evaluate our grantmaking in service to equity, something essential to us, especially during the last three years amidst a pandemic, continued calls for racial justice, and white supremacist attacks on our communities and our democracy. In the report, we talked about how our strategic plan in 2018 provided the groundwork for how we, as a newly reconstituted foundation, would approach our grantmaking.
Back then, we were clear that general operating support would catalyze and sustain systems change in our service region, which is why it continues to comprise most of our grantmaking.
In 2020, we heard from our community-embedded grantee partners that they resourced in ways that made the most sense for their organizational and community-based pandemic response because our unrestricted funding helped provide the flexibility and agility they needed. We learned a lot that year and compiled a report to share these community-level insights, which informed our next evolution of general operating support: the launch of multi-year funding.
As our understanding of our service region’s health ecosystem grows through these types of community conversations, we gain more clarity in each grant cycle of what partnerships are most aligned to help us achieve our mission and vision. It also helps us recognize how we, as a foundation, can better show up as partners.
Driven by this knowledge, our strategic plan and intent to integrate trust-based philanthropic principles into our approach and contribute to the critical work led by the Equitable Evaluation Initiative served as the backdrop while designing our General Operating Support Theory of Change. Developed by our partners, staff and Board, this Theory of Change is a critical component of our Learning & Evaluation framework.
If our strategic plan is our north star, then a theory of change is our map.
We are excited to share our Theory of Change for general operating support with our grantee partners, our peers and the broader HCF community!
This Theory of Change outlines how we will chart our progress toward our vision of success. With this Theory of Change, there are four key questions we hope to answer via general operating support grantmaking:
- Is our grantmaking aligning with the values we have articulated in our strategic plan?
- How is general operating support making a difference at grantee partner organizations?
- How has general operating support equipped grantee partner organizations to move along their racial equity journeys?
- How can our learnings from general operating support grantmaking influence our peer funders and other stakeholders to move toward a more trust-based funding environment (i.e. more multi-year grants) for organizations working toward health equity?
We are learning the answers to these questions in collaboration with our grantee partners through data we gather from annual grant applications and reporting, site visits and other conversations. This information allows us to:
- Understand the conditions our partners are operating in.
- Identify year-over-year themes that inform or impact our partners’ efforts.
- Disaggregate responses by geography, organizational leadership and budget size to help identify micro trends that can guide our response and strategies.
We published an analysis of our 2018-2021 grantmaking, which considers these goals, and plan to share our next insights report about our first full year of implementing our Learning & Evaluation framework later this year. We will also discuss what we learned from Year 1 of our inaugural multi-year funding partnerships. More to come!
All in all, we are influenced by the Equitable Evaluation Initiative’s leadership and inspired to contribute to the aims of the Equitable Evaluation FrameworkTM. We are committed to sharing how we continue to evolve and harmonize our practices with what we hear from partners and peers about what community members in our service region need to lead full, healthy, and happy lives.
In her role, Gillian puts to work her belief that learning and evaluation are essential to transforming society by helping establish the Foundation’s evaluation framework. This process, informed by the Foundation’s strategic plan and leaders in the region, will chart its progress towards equity.
SPECIAL NOTE: Gillian will present the “Choose Your Adventure: How Embedding Choice in Your Partner Learning Activities Can Get You Better Data AND Relationships” session at the GEO Conference in Washington, DC, on May 23, 2023! The session will focus on how we embedded choice for partners into our 2021 grant reporting process and 2022 Grant Cycle. We will share a recap of her session and her upcoming thought piece on the subject, but if you plan to attend, stop by and say hello!