From Data to Impact: Our Approach to Developing the 2024 Impact Highlights

The newly released 2024 Impact Highlights capture the breadth and depth of the Foundation’s support for grantee partners that work to nourish and transform the lives of children who face adversity. This compilation of results and lessons learned builds on our foundational work done in collaboration with grantee partners to develop new approaches to monitoring, evaluation, and learning.

This journey to better understand our shared impact began with surveys and listening sessions with our grantee partners and staff. These conversations helped us identify key principles that now guide our work, including:

• Prioritizing grantee partner experiences and goals in the creation and revision of reporting and application documents;
• Recognizing and encouraging implementation of diverse evaluation methods – valuing both Western and Indigenous methods of knowledge sharing; and
• Learning with and from grantee partners, with the launch of topical learning sessions to allow for the sharing of best practices, opportunities, and challenges.

This collaborative approach to monitoring, evaluation, and learning was the springboard to our Impact Highlights. As I spoke with grantee partners about their impact, I was struck by the diversity of approaches nonprofits and Tribes employ to improve child health. From helping children with serious illnesses rediscover joy at summer camps to increasing knowledge of Indigenous food traditions among youth to supporting local foods in schools, our grantee partners are working across the country to create deep and lasting change for children who face adversity.

Being in conversation with nonprofits and Tribes ensured that the highlights not only present data, but also tell the compelling stories of our grantee partners’ work and the positive changes they are making in their communities.

We are excited to build on these learnings in 2025 and beyond. I am honored to be the steward of sharing our grantee partners’ impact and hope you enjoy engaging with the content as much as we did creating it!

Christina Chauvenet, PhD, serves as Newman’s Own Foundation’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Officer and led the development of the Foundation’s 2024 Impact Highlights.