Sobrato Philanthropies is a California-based philanthropic organisation supporting economic mobility and opportunity in Silicon Valley and beyond. As part of a new ten-year grant making strategy focused on the region’s most excluded residents, it began a two-year process to design a participatory approach to learning and evaluation.
Evaluation is usually commissioned and controlled by the funder. Foundations determine the questions, appoint external evaluators and decide how findings will be interpreted, while grantees provide the data. This arrangement gives organisations being evaluated little influence over the process, despite their knowledge of the work and the communities involved. It can also discourage honesty when grantees believe that disclosing difficulties may affect future funding.
Beginning in 2022, Sobrato worked with researchers to involve more than 120 grantees in focus groups. Their experience shaped the foundation’s understanding of what should be measured, what needed to change and how the evaluation should operate. Grantee representatives then helped select the external evaluation firms, transferring influence over a decision that funders normally retain entirely for themselves.
Sobrato also compensated grantee representatives for their participation, recognising that contributing expertise to an evaluation is work rather than a routine extension of the grant relationship. The resulting process shifted grantees from being evaluated to helping govern the evaluation, while building a learning system intended to support a decade-long strategy.
What practitioners can take from this
Give grantees a formal role in appointing the evaluators. Sobrato’s example shows that sharing control over who conducts an evaluation is a concrete, immediately replicable way to redistribute evaluative power – not simply invite more feedback.