Evaluation

Fund for Shared Insight: Accomplishments & Lessons Learned 2017 – 2020

November 15, 2020

This report is the second three-year look back by ORS impact, this time assessing Fund for Shared Insight’s work, accomplishments, and challenges during its Phase 2, 2017 – 2020. The report examines the status, efforts, and outcomes so far around Shared Insight’s theory of change, which was updated in 2018. It looks at the strategies, approaches, experimentation, and outcomes around Shared Insight’s feedback-practice work, particularly Listen4Good, funder-listening efforts, field-building, and the commitment among the collaborative’s core funders to “walk the walk” in terms of changing their own institutions’ policies and practices to better align with what Shared Insight promotes more broadly.

The report also assesses how Shared Insight responded to the impact of COVID-19 and the uprisings for racial justice on the social sector and the populations of people too often least heard.

Among the key findings:

Shared Insight has continued making a contribution around feedback as a practice, especially for nonprofits.
The external context of U.S. politics and society, as well as widespread critiques of philanthropy and wealth inequity, helped advance Shared Insight’s ideas around EDI and the need for funders and nonprofits to act and listen in a different way than they traditionally have.
Shared Insight has shifted roles in the last three years from primarily being a joint grantmaker to embracing and building upon its ability to convene and influence.
It is worthwhile to continue to wrestle with the question of what is the opportunity and role of the feedback community, particularly Shared Insight’s funding partners, to ensure that feedback, at the least, does not exacerbate inequity, and, at best, is a transformative tool for equity and justice.