Nearly 80 percent of foundations report a change in their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past three years, up from about half in 2019, a report from The Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI) finds.

Based on a survey of foundations with an annual grantmaking budget of at least $10 million or that engage with CEI’s Evaluation Roundtable, the report, Benchmarking Foundation Learning and Evaluation Practices 2023 (35 pages, PDF), found that 78 percent of respondents reported undergoing an organization-wide diversity, equity, and inclusion effort, compared with 56 percent in 2019. According to the report, 65 percent of respondents saw organizational/staff restructuring (up from 61 percent in 2019), 61 percent underwent an organization-wide strategic planning or strategy refresh (down from 68 percent in 2019), and 37 percent reported changes in all three areas.

The survey also found that, compared with 2019, foundations are more frequently considering the diversity of teams when conducting and commissioning evaluation (78 percent vs. 52 percent ), and in addition to diversity, 76 percent of foundations regularly consider team member alignment with equity values when conducting and commissioning evaluations. In addition, about a quarter of foundations are moving to reach consensus with their grantees on deciding what programmatic success looks like (23 percent), what evaluative data mean (23 percent), and the evaluation questions (28 percent).

Respondents also reported changes in staffing practices, as foundations had 11 full-time program staff to every learning and evaluation staff, compared with  nearly 16 to 1 in 2019, with about half of all learning and evaluation staff identifying as people of color, up from 40 percent in 2019.

According to the survey, when supporting other foundation staff on learning activities, learning and evaluation staff reported spending most of their time developing learning plans or agendas, with the least amount of time spent attending to cognitive biases. In addition, far fewer learning and evaluation staff reported having programmatic grantmaking responsibilities in 2023 (46 percent) compared with 2019 (78 percent).

“Foundation approaches to strategy, learning, and evaluation play a major role in whether foundations can successfully meet their equity commitments,” said Albertina Lopez, a director at CEI. “Strategy and evaluation processes have been designed to follow foundations’ priorities and to meet their learning needs. If these processes are inequitable, foundations are reinforcing some of the same inequities that many of their grantmaking dollars are trying to address. The sector is now rethinking the role of power in these approaches, and is listening more to the grantees and communities they intend to serve.”

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Violeta Stoimenova)