The Colorado Trust
A Statewide “Building and Bridging Power” Strategy for Health Equity
THE CHALLENGE
The Colorado Trust’s most recent advocacy funding strategy, Building and Bridging Power (BBP), aims to strengthen an organizing infrastructure and advocacy environment so that impacted community members are able to advance policy solutions addressing their most pressing issues at the local, regional and/or state levels.
The evaluation challenge included:
1. Developing a learning and evaluation plan to capture the needs of 20+ organizations and the foundation.
2. Develop an evaluation that measured community power-building and bridging among grassroots and grasstops groups.
3. Adapting the evaluation plan as COVID-19 led to stay-at-home orders and challenges in organization’s capacities.
THE APPROACH
In partnership with Sally Leiderman and Stephanie Halbert Jones from CAPD, we developed a multi-year learning and evaluation plan that focused heavily on reducing burden for grantees and followed the lead of what CBOs defined as success.
We began with a theory of change process to examine and identify assumptions and articulate the mechanism by which the implementation of the BBP would lead to change. We also prioritized relationship building in the process. We did this by conducting in-depth interviews with the staff from every grantee organization and conducted several design meetings with The Trust team. This reflexive and equitable approach led to a plan informed by all project stakeholders.
HIGHLIGHTS
1. We held a round of in-depth interviews with participants across the state to set the stage for the larger evaluation and to build trust with the organizational partners.
2.We added new methodologies to account for COVID’s impact on the Pathways partners. Including a peer review and virtual interviews.
3. We created a Theory of Change that reflected The Trust’s strategy and community priorities.