Climate SMILE Voices in The Foundation Review
By Various
The latest issue of The Foundation Review (Vol. 18, Issue 3, “Evidence and Learning at the Edge of Crisis”) features seven articles from members and friends of our community, out of nine in the issue. Together they show what it looks like when climate philanthropy takes learning seriously. Here is a short introduction to each.
More Than the Sum: A Collective Vision for the Future of Strategy, Monitoring, Impact, Learning and Evaluation (SMILE) in Climate Philanthropy
Marta Arranz, Rees Warne, Olivia Deich and Amelia Abdelrazik
Organisations funding climate work must learn quickly and make urgent decisions despite uncertainty and limited control. The authors argue that the evaluation profession needs to be reconceived as SMILE (Strategy, Monitoring, Impact, Learning and Evaluation), a framing that puts field-wide learning ahead of isolated organisational accountability. Drawing on three years of building learning infrastructure, they reflect on progress so far and suggest next steps for the sector.
Evidence and Learning Amid a Climate Crisis: Six Promising Frontiers for Advancing Practice
Tim Larson, Shawna Hoffman and Marina Lahowin
The authors argue that the challenge is not a shortage of evidence, but a mismatch between dominant evidence and learning practices and what decision-makers need. They identify six evaluative paradigms and practices, and propose new applications of established approaches to make evidence more relevant to climate action.
Evaluating Complex Social Change: Lessons From Ford’s Climate Change Program
Subarna Mathes, Bess Rothenberg and Kelsey Simmons
This piece looks at how the Ford Foundation evaluated its Natural Resources and Climate Change program through its Office of Strategy and Learning. The authors describe the shifts in strategy and learning that were needed, the relational work required to build buy-in across leadership and program teams, and how findings shaped decisions on grantee support. It offers insights for philanthropies strengthening their evaluation function or taking an equity-centred, systems-change approach.
Feedback Loops in Practice: A Case Study on Evaluating a Climate Collaborative
Mansi Shah, Amy Sherwood, Abbie Turiansky, Drew Koleros and Axum Teferra
How well do funders learn from their investments and from one another? This case study shows how structured feedback loops can serve as an evaluation strategy for complex, systems-focused climate initiatives. Over two years, the authors applied complexity-aware methods and examined power dynamics among funders, regrantors and evaluators. They are candid about gaps, including too little attention to grantee learning priorities, and offer recommendations through a Three Horizons framework.
From Rhetoric to Reality: Piloting Conversation-Based Reporting on Systems Change
Laura Rana Englert
The Climate Emergency Collaboration Group (CECG) is a philanthropic regranter working on systems-level climate interventions. Rather than relying on written reports with fixed metrics, it piloted conversation-based reporting, which values depth over breadth and meaningful two-way exchange. The article documents the rationale, implementation, refinements, obstacles and practical guidance for others considering the approach.
Climate Breakthrough’s Impact and Learning System: A Case Study
Olivia Deich
Climate Breakthrough gives large, multi-year grants to climate strategists without predetermined strategy categories. Grantees set their own performance metrics, and emissions projections inform the evaluation without dominating it. The article’s two recommendations are to invest in varied methods of impact assessment, and to collect a broad set of grantee-defined data so that the complexity of the work is visible beyond emissions alone.
Spend-Down to Scale Up: Limited-Life Giving in the Climate Crisis
Madeleine McKinnon, Samuel Rogers, David Gunsberg and Emma McIntosh
What happens when a foundation has a fixed end date? The authors identify three conditions that spend-down models enforce: funding quickly, collaboratively and boldly on shared goals; keeping capital concentrated on strategic priorities; and prioritising learning and teamwork. Using case studies from Australia’s clean energy transition, they show how finite timelines and trust-based regranting create urgency while leaving field infrastructure that outlasts the funder.
Congratulations to all the authors, and thank you for sharing your learning with the wider field. You can browse the full issue at The Foundation Review
