The Equitable Evaluation Initiative (EEI) emerged from a 2017 research process asking a question that had largely gone unasked in mainstream philanthropy: what might become possible if evaluation were designed and implemented in a way that genuinely promotes equity, rather than reinforcing existing power structures?
With support from the WK Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the California Endowment, EEI developed the Equitable Evaluation Framework (EEF): a set of principles, orthodoxies, mindsets, and sticking points designed to help philanthropic organisations, evaluators, and nonprofits examine how they define success, validity, and evidence. Over five years, the framework was explored by 44 US foundations and more than 200 practitioners.
The framework’s core challenge is direct: it asks evaluators to examine what they believe constitutes valid knowledge, whether they are willing to expand that definition beyond quantitative measurement, and whether community-generated knowledge is treated as legitimate evidence or merely as context. It proposes a series of shifts: from judgment toward curiosity, from extraction toward offering, from fixed toward growth, from participatory approaches toward full reciprocity.
Critically, EEI does not prescribe specific tools or methodologies. It invites organisations to bring equity considerations into every stage of evaluation design and to reflect honestly on who evaluation has historically served. Foundation staff engaging with the EEF have described the experience as intellectually unsettling in productive ways, prompting genuine changes to the questions they ask and how they ask them.
What practitioners can take from this
The Equitable Evaluation Initiative offers grantmakers a structured invitation to examine their assumptions about what counts as valid evidence and whose knowledge matters. For funders whose evaluation practices have not kept pace with their equity commitments, the EEF is a practical place to start.