Principles for TCWF’s evaluation activities

• Central to our conception of stewardship is a commitment to hold ourselves accountable to high standards regarding the quality of our work and the effectiveness of our grantmaking. We expect our grantees to hold themselves to a similarly high standard of performance.
• We recognize the complexity of the task of evaluating the kinds of programs we fund as well as the tradeoffs involved in determining an appropriate funding level for those activities. Consequently, our expectations regarding evaluation are tempered by that understanding.
• Our commitment to fund in traditionally underserved communities brings with it some special evaluation challenges, including uneven institutional capacity for evaluation, a lack of patience with “being studied” given past negative experiences, and political sensitivities regarding premature judgments of “failure” that could have devastating consequences for local residents.
• A central theme of our grantmaking is to enhance the sustainability of front-line providers of health services as well as organizations working to influence public policy and those whose mission is to nurture leadership. We are willing to take informed risks to fund organizations that are struggling against the odds to provide essential services to their communities. Evaluation can be a useful tool to assist them in those efforts.
• We support an approach to evaluation that emphasizes building skills among grantees for self-assessment and continuous feedback for program improvement. An in-depth, qualitative description of program implementation is an important complementary activity.
• It is also important to do the best we can to measure outcomes of our work. We recognize that funders have often required grantees to promise too much in the way of outcomes for the dollars received, which serves no one well. Instead, we hope to help our grantees set realistic goals, just as we understand the limits of evaluation to clearly attribute observed changes in the environments in which our grantees operate to our funding alone.
• We are committed to candid communication about the lessons learned from those activities, both internally and to key external audiences. We see evaluation as a means to the end of creating a true learning community, both among our grantees and among ourselves and our colleagues, where the institutional culture supports a spirit of genuine inquiry rather than the fear of judgment.
• Recognizing the limits of our grant dollars in the context of the multiple health needs of Californians, we choose to balance our investment in evaluation in terms of the ultimate utility it will provide vs. the costs incurred, including the time and energy required of our grantees. As a general guideline, we plan to invest no more than five percent of our grantmaking budgets to that end.