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Practice Guide Series on Doing Evaluation in Service of Racial Equity: A Tool Kit for Practitioners

Kellogg Foundation (2024), vi, 91 pp.

"It has been almost two years since the 'Practice Guides on Doing Evaluation in Service of Racial Equity' were published. Since then, evaluators continue their commitment to advance racial equity through their practice as evident in the number of pre-conference workshops at the 2022 American Evaluat ... ion Association conference (almost one-third of total workshops), activities and publications by the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, and the growing network of culturally responsible equitable evaluation practitioners. Since the practice guides’ release, Community Science, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, conducted many workshops and webinars about the information in the guides. Questions were collected as part of the registration and during the events. The questions shed light on the challenges we still face in supporting and doing evaluation in service of equity. In general, people are still working to get concrete about how to implement such evaluations and overcome the resistance — intentional or not — to engaging in courageous conversations about racial equity and shifting current practices in evaluation, community engagement, strategy development, and grantmaking. The questions reaffirm that evaluators alone cannot advance the practice of doing evaluation in service of racial equity. The guides discuss the importance of recognizing this point. The larger systemic issues at play contribute to racial inequity, and social injustice requires all of us in philanthropy, government, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors to work differently. Community Science compiled common questions from evaluators, funders, executive directors, and program staff, organized them into themes, and attempted to answer them in this tool kit. Some questions cannot be answered easily because the solutions aren’t the evaluation profession and evaluators’ responsibility alone. For instance, questions about the distribution of wealth, role of philanthropy in closing the wealth gap, levers of change to prioritize public and philanthropic investments in communities of color, ways to manage and disrupt power differences between foundations and organizations that receive funding, use of power and narratives to center equity and justice in philanthropy, and building leadership that isn’t resistant to racial equity. There were also questions about shifting power, engaging communities, creating space in federal agencies for discussions about community engagement and racial equity, and changing mindsets and behaviors of leadership. In addition, there were questions we can only answer through a broader dialogue with social scientists from different disciplines with various philosophical approaches to research and evaluation (e.g., is community-based participatory research equitable, how to stop relying on pre- and post-outcome data). This tool kit isn’t intended to repeat the original practice guides. It compiles new information in slide decks, tip sheets, and blogs. Some of the blogs have been written by Daniela Pineda and her colleagues at RTI International in support of the Practice Guides. This tool kit also doesn’t contain all the answers. We invite you to take the guidance farther and share your experiences. This tool kit, in our humble opinion, is merely another way to approach evaluation in service of racial equity and a starting place for people interested in this work." (Introduction) more

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The Step-by-Step Guide to Evaluation: How to Become Savvy Evaluation Consumers

Kellogg Foundation (2017), ix, 251 pp.

"At the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, we believe that evaluation is an effective management tool to both inform strategy development and track the progress and impact of strategy implementation. We have long been committed to supporting our grantees’ ability to derive and share lessons learned from the ... more

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Evaluation Handbook

Battle Creek, MI: Kellogg Foundation (1998), 109 pp.

"Written in an easy language, this manual offers the reader clear action steps to be taken: the planning phase (identifying stakeholders, developing evaluation questions, budgeting, selecting an evaluator), the implementation (determining data-collection methods, collecting data, analyzing and inter ... more