Trust-Based Learning & Evaluation: Lessons from the Fund for an Inclusive California
3/31/2023
By Jazmin Segura, Fund for an Inclusive California and
Maricela Piña, MPH, Community Centered Evaluation & Research
This is part two of a blog series developed in collaboration with the Fund for an Inclusive California (F4ICA), a trust-based collaborative fund dedicated to advancing community-driven solutions to housing justice across California. The blog series explores how evaluation and learning can help inform more effective grantmaking strategies while building stronger and more mutually accountable funder-grantee relationships. You can read the first in the series here.
The Fund for an Inclusive California (F4ICA) has pursued an approach to learning and evaluation (L&E) that is intentionally structured to ensure our grantmaking and priorities are continuously informed by the feedback and inputs we receive from Community Advisors. In addition to helping us build and deepen trust with our community partners, this approach allows us to be more strategic and impactful in how we leverage our resources to advance policy change. Our vision in this approach is that L&E becomes additive rather than extractive, boosting the capacity of groups to strengthen the work they are already doing and to move it forward.
Putting Our Principles Into Practice
“The relationships and connections I have been able to build are important…[I am] benefiting from the direct perspective of Community Advisors and what is bubbling from the Steering Committee – especially as I come up to speed on the decommodification of housing. And that is a big topic and it’s been more accessible because I have the backdrop of what Community Advisors want.” - F4ICA Steering Committee Member
At the heart of trust-based philanthropy is building trusting relationships with grantees who we intentionally recognize as our community advisors and treat as equal partners in the work. Fully embracing this value means embedding trust-based relationships throughout all aspects of our work as funders – including learning and evaluation.
This thinking is radically different from industry standard approaches to evaluation, often led by an outside evaluator who comes in at isolated moments to gather and analyze data in a silo. In our view, the learning and evaluation partner needs to be embedded throughout the grantmaking process, attending meetings, engaging in conversations, and gaining a deeper understanding about community needs and efforts. When we approach evaluation in this way, we gain a much more solid grasp of the context and variables surrounding a social change effort, which in turn allows us to have a much deeper understanding of both the accelerators as well as barriers of social impact.
Over the past four years, F4ICA has established multiple touchpoints with Community Advisors as part of building trust and relationships, seeking to strike a balance between uncovering their needs and priorities and limiting how much time or labor is asked of them at any given moment.
The process is intentionally designed as a two-way conversation, in which Community Advisors are provided the space to reflect on their work and progress, while the Fund reflects on our efforts toward acting as equitable, supportive partners. This two-way street fosters a deeper sense of mutual accountability between us and our partners, while revealing important insights that help us be more responsive and strategic with our funding.
Laying the Groundwork: Exploratory Analysis to Clarify Context & Priorities
When we launched the Fund, we chose to diverge from the traditional philanthropic approach of setting the Fund’s strategies and priorities first and then inviting grantees to apply. Instead, we baked in L&E at the beginning as part of an exploratory phase to understand the context and priorities of grantee partners. Here’s how:
We honed in on a key barrier to resourcing equitable access to housing in California: uneven regional distribution of philanthropic dollars. We were already aware that the Central Valley and Inland Region have long been underfunded by philanthropy. But through our Exploratory Phase conversations with Central Valley Community Advisors, we documented the impact that the dearth of funding has had on their power building and advocacy, including a lack of public knowledge of the depth and urgency of addressing the lack of affordable housing in the region, which many funders and advocates both within and outside the region were previously unaware of.
As a statewide initiative, we followed the lead of Community Advisors to focus on local and regional priorities as opposed to only state-level policy-driven solutions. Groups on the ground told us that each region had its own distinctive set of challenges and solutions for advancing housing justice. As a result, we established a Regional Capacity Building strategy which now comprises 20% of our grantmaking.
Community Advisors exercised full decision-making power over the development and design of their grantmaking priorities. The strategy they helped develop included targeted grants and organizing convenings to build trust among local leaders and facilitate connections to leverage existing resources, rooted in a genuine desire to connect with peers and colleagues. Community partners identified collaboration as a priority to be able to strengthen power building infrastructure in their regions.
One of the results of listening to Community Advisors during the exploratory phase was an awareness that we needed to deepen our support and resources to include the Central Valley. In 2019, F4ICA partnered with Community Advisors from across the state to hold a convening in Stockton to raise the visibility of organizing efforts in the region and to strengthen relationships with organizers from across California. At the convening, leaders from cities and counties along the Highway 99 corridor identified and surfaced how each experiences housing insecurity in their respective community. Eventually this led to the development of the Central Valley People’s Housing Coalition, a formal collaborative of organizers, legal services, and policy advocates. Together, they secured multiple renter protections across counties, protected tenants from unjust evictions, rent increases, and deplorable living conditions – with a particular focus on serving undocumented and mixed-status immigrant families.
Ongoing: Regional Listening Sessions to Strengthen Collaboration Toward a Shared Vision for Housing Justice
“[The Fund] helped us to build the first ever housing coalition in the Central Valley. Their support also helped us to engage new leaders, research and endorse a long-term housing justice theory of change, and move into new campaign areas.” - F4ICA Central Valley Community Advisor
Once the Fund was fully underway and grantees began working on the priorities they identified, we established regional listening sessions, which had a two-fold purpose. One objective was for individual groups who may not already know each other or work together to connect and potentially identify common issues, problems, and solutions in partnership with each other. The other aim was to inform the L&E process and share information that was elevated to funders and community advisors via learning briefs and memos. We sought to be responsive to a common critique by community partners that too often L&E is a one-way flow of information and thus too extractive of groups.
In the Central Valley, these listening sessions have supported groups to strengthen their collaboration by offering an opportunity for them to learn about each other’s work, identify connections, and build solidarity, which was one of the priorities identified during the exploratory phase. In an early 2022 community survey, F4ICA found that Central Valley Community Advisors had significantly increased their scale of collaboration from 2020 to 2022. In 2020, 35% of groups surveyed reported having deeper interaction, at the collaboration, coalition and coordination levels of connection. By 2022, that number had jumped to 75% of groups.
Learning As a Strategy to Strengthen Mutual Accountability
“[F4ICA] creates spaces and processes that feel safe and welcoming to enter into authentic partnership with grantees by continually being aware of the power dynamic and imbalance between funders and grantees. We’re supportive of the Fund’s efforts to continue to ask direct questions about organizations’ capacity, create trust funds, and bring in additional resources to the Valley.” - F4ICA Central Valley Community Advisor
Through our trust-based approach to L&E, we gain a window into the needs of nonprofit and movement organizations, and the communities they serve. This enables us to understand what’s working, what’s not, and how we can become better, more accountable partners.
When we say accountability we mean creating consistent and ongoing opportunities for Community Advisors and other partners we work with to provide their guidance and feedback to our funding and activities. The aim is to ensure that our grantmaking remains aligned with our values, that we stay connected and responsive to community needs and priorities, and our learnings are elevated within the broader field of philanthropy.
As we heard from a Community Advisor, “one of the strengths we see in our partnership with you is that [F4ICA] is constantly having these conversations…you guys are listening to us and pivoting with us, but not everybody's like that.”
Establishing mutual trust and accountability in our relationships with Community Advisors enabled us to create a space where our partners were able to share candid perspectives that allowed us to gain better insights into what was really happening on the ground.
Through our reimagined L&E process, we heard from Community Advisors about leadership and staff transitions taking place within one of the regions. They let us know what they needed to thoughtfully and effectively address the transitions to ensure that leaders, staff, and their organizations would all be supported through the process. F4ICA allocated resources toward transition needs including mental health and well-being support as well as additional coaching time with an organizational development and leadership consultant.
The accountability mechanism we established became all the more important during the pandemic. Initially, we envisioned reaching out to Community Advisors with surveys. Through the L&E partnership, we quickly understood that advisors had no capacity for filling out surveys as they re-oriented themselves and their work to respond to communities reeling from those first months of the pandemic.
We shifted instead into holding one-on-one conversations to find out how they were doing and how the Fund could support them. We heard about their mental health and well-being as well as their campaign priorities, leadership, and team capacity, which helped us understand how they were navigating the pandemic both individually and as an organization. We intentionally focused on the people at the heart of the work, not on grants or deliverables. We genuinely wanted to know how leaders of these organizations (mostly women of color) were navigating the pandemic. Mental health and well-being surfaced in part because of the trust we were able to establish, not because we necessarily asked about mental health.
What we learned through these conversations enabled us to formulate a rapid and emergency response directed toward Community Advisors to support the filling in of gaps as well as shifting into immediate needs identified by people whose lives were urgently impacted by the pandemic, whether that was due to health, housing, or livelihood.
What we heard from Community Advisors in those first months of the pandemic prompted us to direct resources where they were most needed, while continuing to provide support for deeper collaborations. In the Central Valley, this created space for Community Advisors to push for policy and program changes they initially hoped to win prior to the pandemic. Their successful Right to Counsel campaign would have been unimaginable before the pandemic. They have now leveraged their regional efforts into statewide and even national civic engagement, participating in briefings with the White House Housing Summit on the crucial importance of eviction prevention.
Looking ahead, Community Advisors across the state have emphasized the need for F4ICA’s continued support to maintain and expand the powerful cross-discipline coalitions
and intersectional work happening with each region, where groups are uplifting connections among critical issues that intersect with housing justice, including clean water, environmental justice, education, healthcare, mental health, and public safety. We heard this through our regional listening sessions as well as in one-on-one conversations.
Charting the Fund’s Next Phase Through Learning & Evaluation
The Fund’s trust-based and responsive grantmaking and L&E approach have contributed to successful regional organizing and power building efforts in California, particularly in rural areas. We have also helped spotlight the need for expanded resources to support power building in the housing justice ecosystem, which we hope will generate increased interest among our peers in philanthropy to fund similar efforts and approaches.
As phase one of F4ICA’s work continues to reveal new learnings, our planning for phase two, which will set a five-year course in motion, is also underway. Expanding the pool of available philanthropic resources will remain a priority, as will expanding our philanthropic practice of leading in partnership with communities, listening to their expressed priorities, and leveling out the balance of interests between both philanthropy and the communities it supports.
We aim for our L&E approach to continue to uncover needs and priorities identified by Community Advisors across California. We will continue to share out learnings about this evaluation approach, as well as our broader relationship-driven approach, as our efforts evolve and deepen.
Maricela Piña is the Founder and Principal at Community Centered Evaluation & Research
Jazmin Segura is the Director at Fund for an Inclusive California