Foundation News —Chip Edelsberg

Foundation News
—Chip Edelsberg, Executive Director

July 2009

The Jim Joseph Foundation (JJF) from its very onset has devoted significant resources to the assessment of its major grant initiatives.

JJF has a relatively simple rationale for assessing the efforts of its grantees:

To ensure funds are expended for purposes for which they were awarded.
To determine what grantee outcomes the Foundation seeks to measure and how it would like those outcomes documented and reported.
To assess if the desired results were actually achieved.
To learn, in order that subsequent Foundation grantmaking is informed by knowledge acquired.
To contribute to the field by reporting on outcomes and results of grants made and lessons learned. This information, when actively used by JJF and other funders, advances the practice of philanthropy.

We are currently engaged in numerous assessments with a variety of providers. The attached link displays information on this work.

The Foundation takes the following approach to assessment:

As a matter of standard practice, JJF devotes in the range of 5-8% (per grant) to assessment of its major grants (allocated annually). Once a major grant proposal has been approved by the JJF Board of Directors, we work closely with the grantee to gain a deeper understanding of the vision of success the grantee portrayed for us in the proposal we invited them to submit. Together, we identify several potential respondents to a request for proposal that we issue jointly—respondents whose expertise, portfolio of clients, and reputation merits our consideration. We cooperate in selecting the organization/firm/proprietor with which JJF ultimately contracts to conduct the assessment.

JJF routinely relies on assessment experts to guide us—grantees and JJF—through a formal process of theory building and logic modeling. The Foundation believes this architecture is instrumental to envisioning both success of what a potential grant award looks like as well as how to go about achieving success. This formulation grounds JJF and its grantee partners in a shared commitment that becomes the basis on which assessment is designed and unfolds.

Assessment for JJF functions at several levels. For example, we rely on the grantee to carefully assess its own progress toward achieving discrete objectives and goals. (Please see the Hillel self assessment for an outstanding example of the work one of our grantees is currently conducting.) This reporting is not mechanical, but rather functional: it leads directly to learning about what the grantee is doing well and which areas in the grant’s implementation require heightened attention. We strive never to underestimate how difficult it is for organizations to accomplish this work well because they are very often describing complex human behavior in an ever changing social world.

The independent assessments for which we contract are, as you would expect, designed to provide both formative and summative findings. In all instances when reports are received, JJF confers with the assessment team; with the grantee; and with the assessment team and grantee together to examine findings. Our interest is in learning and using that learning in the short-term to improve the particular initiative that is being funded. As an exceptional example of the way in which independent formative assessment is working for us please see the study of the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s JWest Initiative submitted by The Summation Research Group, Inc.

I think it bears noting that the JWest Campership Initiative has for the second consecutive summer not reached the goal we established for enrolling first time residential campers. (We also failed to meet the goal for returning campers.) Mark Sass’s report describes several factors that appear to have mitigated against our success. JJF, the Foundation for Jewish Camp, and The Summation Research Group, Inc. have had several hours of discussion on this report and the implications of it. Our collective best judgment of the findings has led to a proposal to revise the original grant request. This particular example is representative of the way in which JJF uses the assessments it funds.

During the next several years, JJF will aggregate its learning from the various levels and types of assessments it conducts. This should provide us invaluable information enabling us to appraise our own philanthropic effectiveness and to make modifications in our grantmaking as analysis dictates. In addition, this work could yield findings that have utility for other philanthropists and ideally for the field of Jewish education at-large.

In a future column, I will talk about a perspective on assessment that includes a quite different understanding of its place in foundation philanthropy. I view assessment to potentially occupy a much more prominent place in the dialogue foundations have with one another. As stated persuasively by Patricia Patrizi, “for the evaluation conversation to happen more often, more productively, and more widely in foundations, we need to shift from a model of one-off measurement to evaluative inquiry. By understanding evaluation as ongoing, collaborative institutional inquiry, rather than as discrete, outsourced measurement, we can bring it in from the margins to the heart of the foundation enterprise.”

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