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Session Title: Strategic Learning: An Embedded Approach for Evaluating Complex Change
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Panel Session 505 to be held in Lone Star D on Friday, Nov 12, 9:15 AM to 10:45 AM
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Sponsored by the Non-profit and Foundations Evaluation TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Gale Berkowitz, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, gberkowitz@packard.org
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| Discussant(s):
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| Gale Berkowitz, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, gberkowitz@packard.org
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| Abstract:
This panel will discuss strategic learning, an approach to evaluation that works well with complicated and complex strategies that evolve over time and have multiple causal paths or ways of achieving outcomes. These strategies present unique challenges to conventional program evaluation and require fresh thinking and new approaches to ensure that evaluation is relevant and useful. Strategic learning means using evaluation to help organizations or groups learn in real-time and adapt their strategies to the changing circumstances around them. It means making evaluation a part of the intervention—embedding it so that it influences the process. The panel will describe the concept and principles of strategic learning and how it differs from traditional evaluation approaches. Presenters will describe what strategic learning looks like in practice based on their experiences, and will discuss innovative tools and methods that can be used to promote strategic learning.
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The Packard Foundation: Strategic Learning and Systems Change
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| Julia Coffman, Center for Evaluation Innovation, jcoffman@evaluationexchange.org
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In recent years, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has shifted its evaluation approach toward strategic learning. While previously the Foundation focused on summative evaluation that made retrospective judgments about grantmaking programs, the Foundation has moved toward more real-time assessment and learning. This movement fits with the Foundation’s funding for long-term comprehensive strategies designed to produce significant changes on its priority issues. An example of this type of grantmaking, and the use of strategic learning, can be seen with the Preschool for California’s Children grantmaking program and evaluation. Packard knew that the process for achieving this program’s 10-year goal would unfold without a clear script. That prediction has come true; the grantmaking strategy has evolved over time, adapting to changing conditions and opportunities. This presentation will describe the evaluation used to inform the strategy as it has evolved, along with the unique design and methods created in the process.
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The Colorado Trust: Strategic Learning and Advocacy
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| Ehren Reed, Innovation Network, ereed@innonet.org
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The Colorado Trust recently introduced advocacy and systems change in its health care and health coverage grantmaking. With this addition, The Trust adapted its thinking about evaluation to include approaches that would both generate knowledge that grantees could use in real-time and that would inform The Trust’s own strategic learning about effective grantmaking. Funding for a 10-year advocacy strategy to achieve access to health for all Coloradans by 2018 provided the opportunity to try this new approach. This presentation will describe the evaluation connected to this strategy, which is led by Innovation Network in collaboration with a team of local evaluators. The evaluation incorporates informed, evidence-based decision making and evaluative thinking into ongoing strategy development at the local and state levels, and as a result has become a key part of the intervention to build stronger health advocacy in the state.
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The California Endowment: Strategic Learning and Multicultural Interventions
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| Hanh Cao Yu, Social Policy Research Associates, hanh_cao_yu@spra.com
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Complex multi-level and multi-dimensional factors affect the health of people in underserved and culturally diverse communities. The multicultural health strategies required to address these factors can be equally complex and are often emergent. This leads to a disconnect with traditional evaluation approaches and demands a shift in how we think about and approach evaluation. The California Endowment has been a leader in pushing the evaluation field toward new thinking about evaluation in diverse communities. This thinking incorporates strategic learning and uses a multicultural lens. It emphasizes partnership with communities to ensure that their voices and learning needs are prioritized. This presentation will describe learning from a research project funded by The California Endowment, focused on building the capacity of advocates to work with communities of color. The research serves to reexamine conventional notions of (1) how advocacy is defined, (2) mainstream groups’ relationship to communities of color, and (3) what constitutes effective capacity building models and approaches in partnership with communities of color.
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