The Challenge

New Breath Foundation (NBF) is a national, community-led public foundation that provides grassroots organizations with the resources to give a fresh start to Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (AANHPIs) harmed by incarceration, detention, deportation, and other forms of systemic violence in the U.S. In 2021, as anti-Asian violence rose across the United States, NBF launched the We Got Us Fund (WGUF) with a $10 million goal to get resources directly into the hands of AANHPI grassroots organizations. From 2021 to 2026, the fund supported groups working to promote community healing, end scapegoating, build cross-racial solidarity, and advance alternatives to incarceration. As the WGUF approached its sunsetting, NBF sought to evaluate the fund’s impact and document its contribution to the field by preserving what was learned, honoring grantee relationships, and offering a replicable model of trust-based, participatory grantmaking that could outlast the fund itself.

The Approach

New Breath Foundation partnered with Social Insights Research to develop and implement an evaluation plan for the We Got Us **Fund that would focus on continuous learning, reflection, growth, and the use of methods that resource and center communities facing marginalization and oppression. The initial phase of the partnership focused on relationship building and clarifying how WGUF funding supported and amplified the range of missions, values, and activities across grantee partners in order to inform the evaluation plan.

• Theory of Change (ToC) development through listening sessions with NBF staff, funders, and grantee partners to assess the alignment of the fund’s activities with the ToC and refine learning questions

• Systematic document review to understand grantees’ past and current missions, values, and practices; map the landscapes and systems of power; and assess the efforts the fund supported

• Evaluation tool development based on the systematic document review and refined learning questions, designed to capture the grantee experience