Seattle Foundation

The Equitable Evaluation Initiative (EEI) seeks to shift the evaluation paradigm so that it becomes a tool for and of equity for institutions that have placed equity as core to their work. These institutions fall into three sectors: foundations, nonprofits/community, and evaluators/consultants. Their work is interdependent, and each plays a unique role in shifting the evaluation paradigm. EEI provides resources and supports to each. EEI argues that evaluators who work with foundations, and nonprofits who are working on equity, have a special obligation to ensure that their evaluation practices don’t reinforce or even exacerbate the inequities their efforts seek to address. Meeting this vision requires critical thought about all aspects of the evaluative process — the questions we ask, the methods we use, the teams we assemble, and the ways we support the use of data and sense-making around findings. This grant provides flexible support to the initiative.

The Seattle Foundation is the home of the Resource Equity Funders Collaborative, a group of foundations organized to support national and state efforts to improve school finance equity. The Funders Collaborative supports state-specific research and advocacy efforts on education finance, as well as national activities to build the capacity of these coalitions and to monitor and document progress in making education finance more equitable. This grant contributes to the Funders Collaborative’s work. (Strategy: K-12 Teaching and Learning)