St. David’s Foundation is pleased to announce the Data for Equity initiative, focused on equitable evaluation and practices. The Foundation recognizes the important role race plays in advancing health equity, and this initiative specifically focuses on advancing racial equity by supporting organizational efforts to experiment with, and learn from, equitable evaluation and data processes.

This Request for Proposals (RFP) seeks to support the nonprofit sector in sharing their ideas for testing equitable practices and creating space for collective learning. This RFP will provide organizations with the funding needed to dedicate time and resources to apply equitable evaluation principles and models to their work and share what they are learning to advance racial equity.

The Foundation recognizes that some organizations are already leaders in the space of equitable evaluation practices, and they are invited to submit proposals to support their work and/or share best practices with their peers. All applicants are encouraged to include their own perspectives on what equitable evaluation might look like in practice. Broadly, funds can be used to support:

• New or existing data/evaluation projects that align with the principles and models of equitable evaluation, and/or
• The coordination of learning opportunities with community and nonprofit partners to build the sector’s capacity for, and collective understanding of, equitable evaluation

The maximum award per applicant is $25,000. Total funding for grants awarded for this initiative is approximately $200,000. In addition to financial support, we plan to offer up to four learning opportunities throughout the grant term, including training opportunities lead by MEASURE on their C.A.R.E. (Community, Advocacy, Resilience, Evidence) Model. Additional learning opportunities will be determined based on feedback from applicants on key topics of interest.

Ultimately, we hope that this RFP will deepen the Central Texas non-profit and philanthropic sectors’ application of equitable evaluation practices, which in turn will result in organizational and programmatic changes that improve equitable health outcomes for our community. Shifts in practice follow shifts in thinking, and we hope lessons learned through each project can be shared with the larger community to advance our collective understanding of what it means to center equity in our work.