Date: Tuesday, November 3, 2026
Hi, I’m Elena Pinzon O’Quinn, Senior Director of Learning & Evaluation at LIFT, a national nonprofit investing in parents to break the cycle of poverty.
In 2023, LIFT committed to systems and policy change alongside our direct service program, economic mobility coaching. The parents we serve, our members, would set the policy agendas in our four regions: Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and New York. As an evaluator new to policy and advocacy, I quickly saw that evaluation matters at every stage of developing and continuously improving member-led advocacy campaigns.
Our national policy agenda came from three rounds of member input. Member focus groups asked where policy could remove barriers. Next, a survey with more than 400 respondents narrowed the findings to key issue areas. A final listening tour with dozens of members in each region crystalized each region’s focus.
We treated every round as a formal evaluation activity and combined our findings with local policy landscape analyses and internal program data to set agendas. This rigor is what gave Radical Imagining, LIFT’s 2025–2027 National Policy Agenda, its credibility with members, decision-makers, and allies.
We found that working through a logic model with each regional team surfaced our assumptions and made the pathways from member voice to tactics to policy change clear. In their book Advocacy and Policy Change Evaluation: Theory and Practice, Gardner and Brindis noted that there is consensus among advocacy and policy change evaluators on this practice, despite the developmental nature of advocacy campaigns. As such, LIFT treats each logic model as a living tool, revisiting it as campaigns shift.
We track how many members take part in advocacy and which tactics they engage in. In Chicago, for example, we tracked members across multiple advocacy days and whether they stepped into coalition leadership roles. Breadth matters too: building a lasting base protects against burnout and shows partners and allies that we have heard from many voices on the issue at hand.
In 2024, D.C. members identified a local Child Tax Credit as a priority, testified before the Council, and saw the credit written into the city budget. The next year, it was proposed for repeal. If passage had been our only measure, the story would have ended there.
Instead, we tracked interim outcomes, such as coalition partners adopting our recommendations and members going on to lead in other campaigns. We saw firsthand that wins are incremental, and our evaluation needed to capture short-term, movement-building successes. We do this by identifying key milestones on the path to legislation being passed and implemented, and by documenting setbacks and how we responded.
Report findings back to members to show how their input shaped decisions. Closing the loop builds trust, and trust is what makes the next round of data collection honest. As we refresh our member-driven policy priorities in the coming year, we are building in ways to close the loop at every stage.
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