It Begins and Ends with people power.

This is the most important lesson we've learned in and over a decade of Building Healthy Communities (BHC) evaluation, and the guiding north star from which we continue to do our work.

Yet, this wasn’t our initial hypothesis. 10 years of listening and responding to our partners, questioning and testing our assumptions, and being flexible as we learned is what ultimately brought us here. As we move into our next phase and continue to embody health and racial equity in our way of work, The California Endowment is committed to progressing by practicing trust-based philanthropy, emergent learning  and equitable evaluation in our work, learning and pivoting, and promoting that shared learning among all of our partners.

TCE’s Learning and Evaluation team exists to center equity as we build knowledge for and sharpen our strategic grantmaking. The lessons learned help us be more provocative in our questions, and more sure in our assumptions about how change happens. In turn, we share our evaluations so that philanthropic and public funding partners can rethink how they work and invest.