The philanthropic sector is no stranger to headwinds, but the current storm is testing funders’ commitment to equity in ways we’ve never experienced before — and learning and evaluation is at a high-stakes inflection point. Whether foundations choose to reinforce or back away from commitments to equity-centered evaluation now will define the sector for years to come.
Equity-centered evaluation is not a trend to practice when weather conditions are ideal. It is the compass that orients strategy, surfaces what’s working, and keeps communities at the center of what gets measured and why. It’s taken years to build this infrastructure.
With this in mind, over the past year, Engage R+D and Informing Change have partnered with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to engage funders and evaluation practitioners in iterative cycles of learning and reflecting, particularly with respect to the unique challenges now facing the sector.
While funder and practitioner perspectives vary, we’ve witnessed an evolving shift in tone and resolve. Early conversations with funders (documented in this 2025 field brief) were marked by deep and legitimate concern about safety, risks, and tensions between immediate needs and long-term vision. More recently conversations with evaluation practitioners validated those concerns and added to them, but with a determination to leverage this moment, not just survive it. Another generative round of conversations with evaluation practitioners in early 2026 underscored the imperative to strengthen practices and relationships that are more durable and equitable than what existed before.
The headwinds are real, but so is the commitment to moving through them.
Compounding Pressures Reshaping Equity-Centered Evaluation
Pressure to shift language to meet federal mandates is eroding the transparency that makes learning possible. When funders, evaluators, and grantees can’t name what they’re doing, they can’t share what they’re learning. Grantees and evaluators are spending time and resources reframing their work, often in ways that obscure rather than illuminate insights and accomplishments. As a result, the field loses ground it may not recover.
Protecting participant safety is becoming more complex. When working with historically marginalized communities and others facing heightened risk, evaluators are rightly limiting the data they collect, conducting interviews without internet-connected devices, and declining to use AI tools that could create exposure. These are responsible choices, but they come with real trade-offs for representation and the depth of learning that gets captured.
Speed and resource constraints are crowding out inclusion and causing strain. Funders’ appetite for fast results is pushing evaluators toward quicker turnaround timelines that leave little room for incorporating diverse perspectives or creating the community feedback loops that make findings trustworthy and actionable. This can compromise trust, relationships, and the multiple benefits of shared learning.
None of these tensions are new. Many communities and evaluators, particularly those led by and for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, have been navigating constrained conditions for many years. This moment is not unprecedented for them but rather an intensification of familiar terrain. Philanthropy should take that history seriously.
What the Field is Doing — and Asking of Funders
Despite the pressures, practitioners — and some funders — are finding ways to hold the line.
They are focusing locally, where there is often more room to deepen relationships and sustain equity commitments than at the national level. They are striving to maintain infrastructure so it can grow again. They are supporting in-house learning capacity within grantee organizations. And they are continuing to bring community members into the work by interpreting findings and maintaining the feedback loops that are the hallmark of equitable practice.
Some funders are meeting this moment by continuing to support grantees even as those grantees shift operations to survive. Others are exploring trust-based philanthropy in new ways by extending grantee flexibility, reducing reporting burdens, and treating their partners as collaborators rather than contractors.
What practitioners are asking for goes a step further. They are calling on funders to see evaluation and learning firms not as vendors but as partners for the knowledge they hold, the methods they employ, and the relationships they maintain with communities. These assets are part of the philanthropic investment itself.
This reframing has practical implications. It means funders should be investing in evaluation and learning capacity rather than cutting it when budgets tighten. It means valuing developmental evaluation and learning partnerships rather than over-emphasizing summative assessments. It means creating time and space for the kind of reflective learning that strengthens, rather than merely documenting a portfolio’s impact.
Now Is the Time to Lean In, Not Step Back
Pulling back from equity-centered evaluation is not a neutral act. When funders reduce evaluation budgets, or quietly drop community feedback mechanisms, they are not simply cutting costs. They are eroding the infrastructure that makes it possible to know whether their investments are reaching the people most in need and whether those people’s experiences are shaping the work.
The sector spent over a decade building that infrastructure through many noteworthy efforts such as the Equitable Evaluation Initiative, Expanding the Bench, and the Center for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment. It exists in the form of trained evaluators, community relationships, organizational norms, and field practices. It is vulnerable and slow and expensive to rebuild once it’s lost.
What gives us reason for hope are the funders and practitioners who keep leaning into the headwinds. Evaluators are adapting their methods with creativity and care. Grantees are sustaining equity commitments under genuine pressure. And some funders — including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — are choosing to lean into learning rather than away from it. We are asking harder questions, providing multiyear and trust-based grants, and keeping communities close to the process of interpretation and decision-making.
The evaluation practitioners we’ve spoken with are clear: This is a moment for funders to organize and strengthen partnerships with evaluation practitioners, not a time to retreat from them. Funders have the positional power, resources, and responsibility to act accordingly. The gains made in how philanthropy learns and evaluates its work are not inevitable. They require active stewardship. And what funders choose to do right now will shape the field’s capacity for years to come.
Maryam Khojasteh and Miranda Yates are senior program officer in Research, Evaluation, and Learning at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Sonia Taddy-Sandino is the co-founder and co-executive director of Engage R+D. Michael Arnold is a partner and executive director at Informing Change.
