Learning

“The Convenant Foundation believes in embracing risk and reflecting honestly on our accomplishments as well as our disappointments. That’s why we’re committed to building and sustaining a culture of learning.”Convenant Foundation Fellowship Programs

• The Fellowship Programs, offered through the National Academy of Sciences, seeks to increase faculty diversity at U.S. colleges and universities. Fellowships are made at the predoctoral, dissertation and postdoctoral levels to students who demonstrate academic excellence, a commitment to pluralism and a strong interest in teaching and research. Eligible applicants include citizens, nationals and permanent residents of the United States, as well as individuals granted deferred action status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

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We are always learning

• Our leadership and program staff come from the fields we work in, bringing seasoned insight and energy to our issues. Committed to excellence, they care deeply about ensuring that the foundation’s investments are meaningful and effective. But our own expertise is just a starting point.

We learn by doing.

We take a long-term approach to social change, targeting the root causes of problems as well as some of their symptoms. And so we learn from everything we do: from individual grants, from series of grants, from grant making within a field, across the foundation and around the world. We listen closely to our grantees—attentive to their progress as well as any obstacles they’re facing—and together make choices about how to move forward. We know that tackling complex challenges of injustice and inequality means being willing to reexamine what we thought we knew.

We learn by collaborating.

We try new things. We experiment. We stay true to our mission, but leave room to explore and support promising new areas. And we seek out experts to challenge our thinking. We want to learn not just from leaders in the fields where we already work, but from those in areas where we might have less experience. We also look to our peers and partners for insight, and listen to their experiences. By working collaboratively within the foundation and across sectors, we’re able to better understand and anticipate the needs of the people our work is meant to serve.

We reflect on our progress and make adjustments.

Together with the organizations we support and a broad community of social change makers, we are engaged in a continuous, deliberate process of improvement and growth. By nature, our work is difficult to evaluate: In many cases, assessments of our efforts can’t tell us whether our larger goals have been achieved, but only whether we are on the right path to realizing them. Our results reporting and evaluation processes aren’t simply ways for us to delineate successes and failures, but a means for us to examine our motivations and draw lessons from our work.

We share what we learn.

We’re always searching for new and more effective ways to communicate our ideas and insights, and seek out opportunities to hear from our colleagues in the nonprofit and philanthropic communities. Over the years we’ve published reports, organized convenings, created interactive explainers and invited academics to delve into our archives. All of this will continue as we explore fresh ways to communicate our latest knowledge and ideas. We hope our learning will strengthen the impact not just of the Convenant Foundation, but of philanthropy as a whole.