Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI)
Social determinants of health; Community power-building; Racial equity
Strategic Communications
National
Health+ Studio partnered with the CEI to capture The California Endowment’s hard-won lessons from a decade of “pivoting to power.” The resulting learning case — shared at CEI’s 2024 Evaluation Roundtable — challenges philanthropic leaders to reimagine their role in building community power to create resilient, healthy communities.
When The California Endowment (TCE) launched its $1 billion Building Healthy Communities initiative in 2010, it arrived with a clear framework: a Social Determinants of Health approach, a defined set of focus areas, a north star, and goals already set. Like much of the philanthropic sector at the time, the initiative was designed from the top down — with the foundation’s expertise and plans leading the way.
The communities it intended to serve pushed back.
What happened next is the kind of institutional reckoning that rarely gets documented honestly, let alone shared publicly. TCE didn’t quietly pivot and move on. It sat with the friction, learned from it, and eventually transformed its entire approach to grantmaking.
By 2023, the Center for Evaluation Innovation (CEI) — a research organization dedicated to advancing racial equity and justice in the philanthropic sector — wanted to bring that story to its Evaluation Roundtable, a network of learning and evaluation leaders from over 130 foundations, and a leading-edge platform for peer learning. The Roundtable focuses on “increasing the ability of foundations, nonprofits, and other change agents to navigate and transform the complex dynamics that shape our world.”
The goal was to use TCE’s decade of learning of centering community power as a teaching case of what it looks like when a major foundation genuinely changes course.
They knew a written report wouldn’t capture the complexity or the humanity of the journey. CEI needed something that could hold the room and spur constructive dialogue.
They partnered with Health+ Studio to build it.
Working with CEI to identify the most impactful storytellers, Health+ conducted in-depth interviews with TCE leadership to understand not only the foundation’s journey through the process but also their own growing perspective and consciousness around the idea of community-led transformation. What emerged was a story with two distinct turning points, as articulated by then TCE CEO, Dr. Bob Ross:
The first pivot was an acknowledgment of what the document describes as the “arrogance” of arriving with a pre-set ten-year plan — and being met with community resistance. The second pivot came from witnessing what became possible when the foundation changed course: investments in community power that led to concrete wins, including a successful fight against exclusionary school discipline and a community-led “Parks for All” ballot initiative in Fresno.
These weren’t abstract lessons in evaluation theory. They were specific, human moments that illustrated a fundamental reframe: that building collective community power is not just a strategy for improving health outcomes — it is, itself, the intervention.
The resulting video — Pivot to Power: The California Endowment’s Learning Journey — served as the centerpiece of the 2023 Evaluation Roundtable Convening. It was watched and discussed by staff from 60 major foundations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
In addition to offering a starting point for conversation, the case study video modeled a different kind of evaluation storytelling– one centered on honest institutional reflection rather than polished impact reporting.
More information about the Evaluation Roundtable event.