January 12, 2023
“Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count.
Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” – Albert Einstein
This famous quote from Albert Einstein is something I’ve been reflecting on as I think about how to hold Caring for Colorado accountable to our mission to create equity in health, well-being and opportunity for children and families in Colorado. As a statewide, responsive grantmaker, with a variety of funding priorities, it can be hard to fully understand our progress toward meeting this mission. I do know, however, that understanding where we invest and who we invest in is an important first step.
Caring for Colorado has been capturing this type of information from our grantees in a variety of ways, including through a general, narrative question in our grant application, in grant reports, and through conversation at site visits.
We are now including specific questions in our grant application regarding race/ethnicity, gender identity, income, geography, and other demographics for both organizational leadership and the communities served. Answering these questions will not affect your eligibility for funding. If you do not have the requested data, you will have the opportunity to say so.
The purpose is to help us collect data in a uniform way and to strengthen our ability to evaluate the effectiveness of our work in reflecting our guiding principles and, ultimately, in working toward our mission. We decided to follow the Candid/GuideStar model for demographic data collection because it was created specifically for the mission-focused nonprofit sector.
Caring for Colorado is dedicated to being transparent in our grantmaking. By the end of 2023, our goal is to provide additional information from the new data being collected, sharing information about the organizations receiving funding from Caring for Colorado, as well as aggregated data on the demographic and geographic features of our grant funding.
We will report our learnings over time and, as always, I welcome your feedback.
Yours in health,
Linda