Working with jdcPartnerships “Really did make me think differently. Now as I think about other projects, I will definitely come back to the systems and tools that we used.”
— Jewelle Gomez, Program Officer, Horizons Foundation

Horizons Foundation: More than a Perfunctory Exercise

The Challenge: Jewelle Gomez, Program Officer at the Horizons Foundation, needed to evaluate the People of Color Creating Equality (POCCE) program. She was concerned, that like much of the other evaluation she had experienced, this evaluation would be a perfunctory exercise that used substantial financial resources but didn’t yield any new knowledge or insights.

“I think that a lot of foundations spend a lot of money on evaluating what they are doing and I’m not sure how much people get out of it… Anything that has been of deep or dramatic significance has always come to light through my personal relationships with my grantees, not through evaluations.”

Background:The Horizons Foundation works to support and celebrate the LGBT community. The POCCE Program in particular strives to increase the capacity of LGBT organizations to work with and for communities of color.

Gomez needed a consultant who could understand the Foundation’s perspective and “be able to assess and interpret information in a way that would be valuable to us.” Yet she also needed an evaluator who could relate to her grantees as People of Color, “was experienced with the nonprofit world, and had a sense of cultural consciousness and activism. Those needs led me to jdcPartnerships. I feel lucky that they were recommended to me and look forward to working with them on other projects.”

The Work: To utilize the Foundation’s resources for the highest good, jdcPartnerships designed a targeted inquiry process. The goal of this process was to identify and address questions Gomez had that would support new insights for her, as well as gather more routine information on the effects of the program that might confirm things she already knew. A flexible framework was developed that used resources effectively. A specific focus was maintained, yet there was room to expand into important directions that arose.

Results: Gomez was very pleased to find that the experience of working with jdcPartnerships turned out to be much more than just hiring an evaluation consultant. She identifies four important purposes served by the evaluation report:

  1. It both demonstrated outcomes as well as documentation of the context that informed the work.
  2. It surfaced important aspects of their work that people were hesitant to name but that were critical making meaningful progress toward their goals moving forward.
  3. It offered new insights and contributed to the understanding of Horizons and their funder about LGBT work in communities of color.
  4. It powerfully articulated the program results & political context in a way that will be invaluable in future conversations and work on LGBT issues in communities of color.

Through the process Gomez also developed new appreciation for evaluation. “I’ve learned much more about how an evaluation can go well and how it can be useful as opposed to cursory or perfunctory I’ve learned how thorough an evaluation can be without being exhaustive. Without trying to investigate every nook and cranny of an organization I can get a thorough report on a project’s effectiveness. I will have those expectations in the future — both for myself as well as for anyone else I work with.”

Gomez’s leadership also developed as she acquired new tools through her work with jdcPartnerships that she will use not only for approaching future evaluations but also with program strategy, planning, and design. “Working with jdcPartnerships made me think differently. Now as I think about other projects, I will definitely come back to the systems and tools that we used. They will shape my thinking as I go forward with other projects, talk with a consultants, formulate my thoughts and communicate with many audiences about my work.”