Evidence for Equity

Using evidence and knowledge to close equity gaps

What We Work For

We are at a pivotal time in efforts to improve the health, education, and well-being of children, youth, and families in the United States.

Our goal is to work together with leaders in philanthropy, government, and within communities to implement strategies to address health disparities, reduce poverty and boost incomes, create effective schools, and transform neighborhoods that have been traditionally marginalized—all to achieve better, more equitable outcomes for those communities in greatest need. These complex initiatives usually involve transforming public systems or revitalizing communities…or both. Such transformation requires a different knowledge base than we have relied on in the past.

How We Do It

Encouraging the use of transformative approaches to generate and apply knowledge and evidence, we hope to create a network of unique partners who can leverage a range of talents and skills to effect wide-reaching, innovative change.

Ultimately, we hope to set a new standard in the field that:

  • Ensures that those most affected by change—community residents, those involved with public systems, others—participate in generating and applying evidence.
  • Uses all available sources of credible knowledge to understand the problem to be solved, the context within which it is to be addressed, and to design the solution.
  • Maintains a steadfast focus on results for everyone.
  • Deploys multiple evaluation methods to gauge the progress of complex initiatives, which often involve policy and systems change and shifts in dominant cultural narratives over many years.
  • Harvests learning and evidence from on-going innovation in ways that promote continuous improvement and adaptation of what has worked in the past.

The Evidence for Equity initiative began in 2018 as the result of a symposium focused on the intersection of evidence and equity. This daylong conversation was designed to explore the relationship between evidence and achieving more equitable outcomes while also recognizing often overlooked evidence necessary for advancing equity.

We were thrilled to bring many greater thinkers from the field together to discuss this critical notion of centering equity in the conversation about evidence. From the seeds of that conversation, we are working to spread this important work to a larger field through in-person and digital discussions. It is our hope that using the hashtag #Evidence4Equity will create a digital space to amplify this work—both ours and what is being done in the field by friends and partners—and give us a unifying umbrella under which to house these important changemaking conversations.