In partnership with The California Endowment, Blueprint designed an approach to the evaluation of foundation supported policy change efforts, synthesizing input from a wide range of experts in the field, advocate grantees, and foundation staff. The framework we advance involves building grantees’ capacity for evaluation, helping them outline from the start how they see their activities leading to their goals, and then helping them set benchmarks along that path in order to track progress and provide real-time feedback to inform their ongoing work. Our 2005 report, The Challenge of Assessing Policy and Advocacy Activities: Strategies for a Prospective Approach has been widely circulated and commended, and served as the organizing structure for an Endowment-sponsored, groundbreaking convening of advocates, evaluators and funders in 2006. We synthesized the results of that meeting in a second paper, The Challenge of Assessing Policy and Advocacy Activities: Part II – Moving from Theory to Practice.
Blueprint helped the foundations assess the value of a series of stakeholder discussion groups, assembled to provide the Secretary of Health and Human Services with feedback on the governor’s proposed sweeping changes to Medi-Cal in 2004. Our analysis of interviews with more than 30 government officials and advocates helped the two foundations understand how to improve their effectiveness in this new public policy role.
