Deepening Our Understanding of Resilience: How Evaluation Can Contribute

Resilience is the capacity to experience a significant shock and adapt as needed to survive and move forward. The current age is one of constant system shocks economically, environmentally, and politically. Resilience becomes essential for navigating these and other risks. Individuals, organizations, communities, and ecosystems manifest different degrees and types of resilience requiring appropriately matched evaluation responses. In considering new directions for philanthropic evaluation, this article offers for the first time an overarching framework of four different responses to system shocks and disruptions. This leads to four different evaluation criteria: continuity, adaptation, innovation, and capitulation. In addition to the long-term value of elevating adaptive resilience as a core capacity and evaluation criterion for grantees and foundations generally, the more immediate reason to focus on resilience is the political and financial disruption created by the Trump administration’s regressive policies aimed at ending progressive initiatives for a more just and sustainable world. Systematic evaluation of the effects of regressive policies is an opportunity for philanthropy to take a serious look at how foundations and grantees respond to powerful and organized opposition, to learn how to deepen and enhance resilience, and to figure out how to mitigate short-term destructive effects so they do not become permanent.