Data Ethics Guidebook: Cultivating an ethical mindset in research & evaluation

In 2022, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation invited Informing Change to reimagine the Guidebook on data ethics we produced for the Foundation in 2010. In doing so, we considered the evolving ecosystem of values, players, and circumstances in which evaluation is now happening in philanthropy.While appreciating the insights evaluation work can yield, we acknowledge the ways evaluation can do harm. First, this Guidebook establishes baseline practices for reducing the risk of causing harm through unethical approaches. It also offers more equity-oriented, participatory approaches beyond this baseline to add care or increase the value of participation to communities sharing their data.This Data Ethics Guidebook is a planning tool and go-to resource for evaluators, Foundation staff, and other social sector commissioners of evaluation. It is concerned with 'data ethics'* —the potential ways in which data-related activities can adversely impact people and society. It offers practical guidance to assess and respond to ethical issues that show up in applied research and evaluation activities. Throughout the Guidebook, Stories from the Field capture the real-world experiences of practitioners grappling with how to do evaluation more ethically.

Collaborating Within to Support Systems Change: The Need For — and Limits of — Cross-Team Grantmaking

To be responsive to the many facets of communities’ challenges and solutions, the Kresge Foundation works intentionally at the intersections of its seven grantmaking areas. One way it fulfills this intention is by awarding cross-team grants, which involve financial and intellectual contributions from multiple Kresge programs in order to enable cross-sector, multidisciplinary work among grantees. As Kresge’s cross-team practice has grown and the field has increasingly expressed interest in cross-sector approaches to addressing long-standing challenges, Kresge partnered with the strategic learning firm Informing Change to explore how this approach to grantmaking and greater degree of internal collaboration is working from the point of view of Kresge staff and what enables or inhibits it, as well as whether and in what ways grantees uniquely benefit from cross-team grants. This article highlights key findings from this exploration, including grantees’ appreciation for Kresge’s cross-team approach. Nevertheless, the resource-intensive level of the foundation’s internal collaboration compelled many Kresge staff to seek evidence of impact in the short term, despite the challenges inherent in measuring complex, emergent, and unpredictable cross-sector work. Kresge’s experience with cross-team grantmaking surfaces a deeply embedded challenge across philanthropy: the historical practice of structuring grantmaking work by program content area is often misaligned with the urgent need to work across sectors to drive complex systems change. As philanthropy seeks to support collaboration among grantees and launches new multifunder collaboratives to affect systems change, structures within foundations may need to change to actualize this ideal