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Inside The Foundation Review, Vol. 18, Issue 2

Inside The Foundation Review, Vol. 18, Issue 2

The Commitments We Keep

For philanthropy, the last decade has been a period of genuine self-examination. As recent issues of The Foundation Review have shown, many foundations have made or strengthened their commitments to trust, equity, community voice, power building and sharing, and learning and unlearning. These commitments reflect real shifts in how foundations are thinking about their purpose and role. But the last decade has also shown that candor about intentions is not the same as accountability for practice.

This issue is an open one — we did not invite articles on a common theme. And yet, reading across the contributions, a throughline emerged. Many authors implicitly explore a similar question: Why are there gaps between what foundations say they value and what their structures, habits, and incentives actually produce, and what will it take for us to close them?

These gaps are not born of bad faith. They exist because closing them is genuinely hard. Shared power requires renegotiating relationships that have settled into routine asymmetries. Evaluation that is more equitable requires dismantling the orthodoxies embedded in professional norms. Learning requires building conditions for honest inquiry. The articles gathered here take these difficulties seriously — not to excuse the gaps, but to make them easier to close.

Headshot: Julia Coffman

Signature of Julia Coffman in light black inkJulia Coffman, Editor-in-Chief
The Foundation Review

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Inside Vol. 18, Issue 2:

From Framework to Practice: Insights About Aligning Foundation Impact and Strategic Positioning in a Trust-Based Philanthropy Era
Nancy Pole, Marie-Andrée Mbengue-Reiver, and Anne Loranger-King

Foundations often struggle to align how they think about impact with how they measure and learn from their work — a challenge that can intensify with trust-based philanthropy. This article offers a framework that helps foundations clarify their impact orientation along two dimensions: how they define success and how they approach their role as funders. The authors use a case study to illustrate how the framework helps foundations better align their strategic positioning with their definitions of impact.

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How, for Whom, and Under What Conditions: Using a Causal Pathways Approach to Support the Goals of Philanthropic Evaluation
Drew Koleros, Sophie Bright, Dana Harrison, Megan Shoji, and Tina Fletcher

As evaluators push beyond description toward more rigorous explanation, asking not just what changed, but how, for whom, and under what conditions, causal pathways approaches are attracting growing interest. Yet practical guidance on how to apply them in philanthropic settings, or how to assess their quality, remains limited. This article takes up that challenge through a case study of a causal pathways approach to evaluating students’ experiences across four virtual and hybrid K–12 learning models.

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Paying for Participation: Equitable Compensation Models for Community Co-Researchers
Jamie Zimmerman and Prabhneet Kaur Girn

Community-engaged research is increasingly central to philanthropic practice, yet there is little available guidance on how to fairly compensate community members who participate. This gap is especially acute for youth, who face unique administrative, legal, and developmental constraints. This article presents findings from a mixed-methods case study comparing three youth participatory action-research projects. Authors offer a suite of practical tools to help organizations navigate compensation challenges.

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Disrupting the Time Space Continuum: Time Travel as Methodological Practice for Building Evaluation Capacity
Linetta Alexander

Grounded in the principle of Sankofa and inspired by Afrofuturism, this article explores time travel as a methodological lens for building evaluation capacity. Use of the proposed five-phased framework encourages organizations to engage in cyclical and reflective practice — analyzing themselves in their work, developing trust with fellow travelers (teammates), exploring the impact of social contexts, and developing a plan to transform their organizations from within.

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Unpacking Assumptions: What Evaluation Capacity Building Looks Like When It’s Optional, Flexible, and Funded
Jennifer Marsack, Martena Reed, Robiel Abraha, Abby Triño, Sara Jones, and Brita Blesi

Evaluation capacity building in philanthropy is often designed around a set of common assumptions. This article challenges these assumptions based on insights from a multi-year Houston Endowment initiative. Drawing on evaluation evidence, it explores how co-creating learning goals in a strengths-based structure can meaningfully shift an organization’s evaluation capacity and culture.

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Power-Sharing Under Pressure: What a Decade of Community Partnership Reveals for Philanthropy Today
Clare Nolan and Pilar Mendoza

As foundations question long-held assumptions about who holds power in philanthropy, many have shifted decision-making authority toward communities. This article explores what that shift looks like on the ground. Drawing on reflections from community leaders, grantees, and technical assistance partners, along with years of longitudinal evaluation findings, the authors examine how power-sharing commitments translated into practice across grantmaking, programmatic support, and evaluation.

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Reimagining Power and Practice: Grantee Reporting for Greater Impact
Steven LaFrance, Jamae Morris, and Lauri Valerio

An evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s pilot on alternatives to written reports found that Oral and Alternative Reporting (OAR) options reduced burden and improved usefulness while being values-aligned and scalable. For foundations considering similar approaches, the authors recommend codifying choices, focusing on questions that matter, building technology that supports multiple formats, preparing staff for relational learning, and compensating grantees for additional learning-related time.

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Adaptive Learning Partnerships in Action: Insights and Reflections From the MacArthur Foundation’s Big Bet On Nigeria
Julian Williams and Michael Moses

Drawing on their collaborative work with the MacArthur Foundation’s Big Bet On Nigeria, the authors examine how to develop a strategic learning partnership that works. They offer practical insights on how foundations can cultivate learning relationships built on trust, aligned with the priorities of program staff and grantees, and timed to produce insights when they are most useful. The result is a roadmap for embedding strategic learning into complex, portfolio-level, systems-focused initiatives.

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