Connecting Learning, Performance and Accountability to Advance Impact

When all members of an organization embrace its culture-building responsibilities, a healthy, well-aligned, effective culture leads to improvements in organizational performance and results. The systems of accountability we have and create as members of the philanthropic community strengthen trust and enables solutioning for our partner communities. We must understand and lean into accountability as a guiding consideration for every action we take and every decision we make.

Our work is interdependent, and everyone must work together in a deliberate and coordinated way to cultivate our collective transformation. In order to live out our core values fully and achieve the outcomes we seek for children and families, we must hold ourselves and each other accountable in our commitments to our work. How we work individually and together is distinctly connected to the level of impact we can deliver in the community. Being accountable enables us to do even more and is an integral part of being an effective contributor to systems change.

Learning Approaches

We seek to understand, measure, and share how our work contributes to advancing the outcomes and impact we seek. We also seek to understand how effectively we are showing up as funders and the specific difference our actions are making.

The foundation’s strategic approach is applied to our objective-setting and learning approaches, which connect learning, performance, and accountability. Our learning practices have built-in flexibility and quarterly opportunities for reflection. As a board and staff, our team is trying to answer the impact question in a highly practical way, putting in place practices that allow for just-in-time assessment of progress and allow for change. These practices — both internally as a team and with our partners — allow teams to pause, assess progress (or a lack thereof), share learnings, and make decisions about what needs to adapt and shift. We see learning as not just a process but also an important outcome of our ongoing adaptive work.