September COEN Community of Practice Meeting
Wednesday, September 20, 5:30-7:30 PM
Panera Bread, 640 S Colorado Blvd, Glendale
Topic: Evaluation & Learning with Foundations
Facilitators: Kelci Price (Senior Director, Learning & Evaluation at the Colorado Health Foundation) and Lauren Gase (Senior Researcher, Spark Policy Institute)
Please join us on Wednesday, September 20 for our 9th COEN Community of Practice meeting. These meetings are informal, with a specific topic, facilitator, and practice-building purpose to guide discussion. They are intended to let you share with and learn from your colleagues and grow in the profession.
From 5:30 to 6:00 we will gather, introduce ourselves, and get coffee or dinner at the counter if you wish.
At 6:00 we'll start our informal program: Evaluation & Learning in Foundations.
Want to talk about how foundations are thinking about evaluation and learning, the unique challenges they face, and how they tackle evaluation and learning work? Evaluation in philanthropy is informed by broader trends in the evaluation sector, but it’s also a unique setting where evaluation practice has developed in some interesting ways. Even if you’ve never worked with foundations, this discussion is designed to dive into topics that have implications for many organizations, such as: evaluation under conditions of emergent/adaptive strategy, deliberate experimentation and learning across time, opportunities for innovating in evaluation practice, evaluating foundations as an actor in the theory of change, effective learning when every grantee approach is different, etc.
Join us to hear multiple perspectives from both foundation evaluation staff and external evaluators who work with foundations. Bring your questions and insights, and join in the discussion. Also bring a colleague!
Upcoming months will feature health program evaluation on October 25 and evaluation capacity building on November 29. Our annual meeting will be in early December.
Have a suggestion for a location in another area of the metro for a future meeting? Would you like to facilitate a future discussion? Send the suggestions to us at Colo.Eval.Network@gmail.com.
