Community Foundation Sonoma County launched the Strengthening Capacity, Connections and Community Cohort to support Sonoma Valley-based nonprofits to deepen their capacity to serve the community’s most vulnerable populations. Korwin Consulting is co-facilitating this three-year capacity building initiative through coaching, convenings, and technical support to participating organizations. The ultimate goal is to build a strong, connected, and resilient non-profit sector.
The Women’s Foundation of Mississippi (WFMS) is dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls by promoting social change and economic self-sufficiency. Korwin Consulting has partnered with WFMS to build an evaluative culture within the foundation. Beginning with a retrospective evaluation and visioning process with WFMS staff and board members, Korwin Consulting has helped the foundation to articulate its grantmaking goals, design grant application and reporting tools, and build the evaluation capacity of its women’s economic security grantee cohort. Korwin Consulting worked with WFMS to expand and evaluate their Access to Opportunity Initiative, including the development of a logic model and case studies for the initiative. The Access to Opportunity Initiative builds women’s and girls’ economic opportunity through, or in close partnership with, community college programs.
Download the Access to Opportunity Case Study report here.
The Women’s Foundation of Alabama supports a two-generation approach to ending generational poverty. Korwin Consulting partnered with the Foundation to evaluate its most ambitious two-generation initiative to date. Thrive Together selected multi-sector partners — community colleges, nonprofit agencies, government leaders, childcare centers, and faith groups — to join forces to support women and their children in the difficult move beyond poverty. These stakeholder groups developed and led three Family Workforce Hubs in the Greater Birmingham area.
Korwin Consulting conducted a mixed-methods evaluation designed to support the Foundation and its partners to reflect on the strengths, impact, and ongoing opportunities for building the effectiveness, sustainability, and replication of the Thrive Together model.
Through a network of more than 120 women’s funds and foundations, The Women’s Funding Network (WFN) provides gender justice leaders and advocates with a variety of tools to help them succeed—from research and education, to strategic-led initiatives and events, to advocacy and unifying a collective, amplified voice. Korwin Consulting has worked on several projects with WFN over the years. Most recently, we were integral to the process and evaluation of Women’s Economic Mobility Hubs (WEMH) (2020 – 2021), an initiative in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that invested in 9 U.S.-based women’s funds and foundations implementing place-based models to increase economic mobility for women and gender expansive people and their families. We assisted cohort members in identifying joint metrics to track collective progress and impacts; provided evaluation coaching with the executive and program staff of individual members; and developed interim and final reports and presentations on the achievements, challenges, and lessons gained through this initiative.
Before this, we conducted an evaluation of WFN’s Two-Generation Policy Advocacy Cohort (2017 – 2019), providing evaluation coaching, developing a policy advocacy evaluation webinar for this learning cohort of women’s foundations from across the country, and conducting a mixed methods evaluation about cohort members’ experiences, motivations, and policy outcomes from their individual and collective efforts.
Korwin Consulting also worked as a strategic evaluation partner in WFN’s Partnership for Women’s Prosperity (PWP) — a partnership of U.S. women’s foundations working to help economically vulnerable women and girls gain economic security through education, job training, and employment opportunities — from 2012 through the initiative’s sunset in 2017. Korwin Consulting’s evaluation of PWP revealed that using a systems change framework, which includes emphases on five key approaches — effective programming, creating strong and effective linkages, improving the political environment, developing a strong infrastructure, and taking efforts to scale — can successfully position both local programs and national initiatives to effect change on key social issues.
Download the Partnership for Women’s Prosperity Systems Change Framework report here.
Additional projects with WFN include working with the WFN Fund for Shared Insight initiative, which highlighted best practices women’s foundations are using to increase their openness and transparency.
Futures without Violence is implementing the Workplaces Respond to Domestic and Sexual Violence Pilot Site Program, a federally-funded pilot site program seeking to address the problem of sexual violence in low wage industries in the United States. The program works collaboratively with worker associations, employers, and anti-violence advocates to develop and promote sustainable, industry-focused, locally and culturally-relevant trainings, education tools, policies, and practices that prevent and respond to domestic and sexual violence and stalking. Korwin Consulting is designing and implementing an evaluation of this program, including developing self-sustaining evaluation tools that partner sites may use to evaluate future impact.
The Women’s Foundation of Minnesota (WFM) is a statewide community foundation investing in innovation to drive gender and racial equity. Korwin Consulting has partnered closely with the Foundation since 2015 by integrating evaluation into its strategies to advance equity for women, girls, and gender-expansive people with an emphasis on communities of color and low-income and immigrant communities. Korwin Consulting serves as the evaluator for many of the Foundation’s initiatives, developing and implementing evaluation strategies that will maximize the impact of its grantmaking programs. Recent and ongoing projects include:
The Trans-Bay Training & Education Collaboration, a partnership between City College of San Francisco, Berkeley City College, the Regional Health Occupations Resource Center, and a number of health and social service community partners, sought to address critical training needs within the health and social service field. Korwin Consulting’s formative research study provided T-TEC partners with key information about the training needs of frontline health and social service paraprofessionals, including how best to sensitively and effectively engage a multicultural current and prospective workforce with varied skills and skill levels in these trainings. Once implemented, Korwin Consulting evaluated the initiative, capturing students’ educational and workforce outcomes.