Reflections on Evaluating Our Grants

Since its creation in 1992, the California Wellness Foundation has awarded more than 3,500 grants totaling more than $432 million to improve the health of the people of California. From the beginning, the foundation has had a strong commitment to evaluation and has both assessed every individual grant it has made as well as funded independent evaluations of its major programs. In Reflections on Evaluating Our Grants (17 pages, PDF), Ruth Tebbets Brousseau, the foundation's director of evaluation and organizational learning, presents specific case studies from the foundation's first dozen years of grantmaking and shares some of the lessons she and her colleagues have learned. The report is the tenth in TCWF's Reflections series, all of which are available online in HTML and PDF format.