Evaluating the Chicago Community Trust Education Program

The Chicago Community Trust is a regional community foundation, built by generations of Chicagoans to support a safe, healthy and productive future for every resident.

This project evaluated the CCT Education Program from 2005 to 2010. In current work, our first short-term goal is to provide feedback to help the CCT Education Program officers evaluate the effectiveness of programs it funds. Our long-term goal is to strengthen connections between CCT’s and individual grantees' planning and to increase the quality of grantees' evaluations, thereby developing CCT’s capacity to (a) assess the overall impact of its theory of action and (b) build a broad base of knowledge cutting across individual grants. The lessons learned will improve communication of evaluation expectations to future grantees and lead to better information about the effectiveness of education grant making to inform funding strategies.