Meet Our Partners: Bernadette Sangalang

Engage R+D turns five this year and to celebrate we’re reflecting on the state of evaluation and learning, including in conversation with our partners. For the final interview in our series this year, we spoke with Bernadette Sangalang, PhD, Program Officer & Manager at The David & Lucile Packard Foundation.

Tell us about your role and the issues you seek to address through your work.

Our Families & Communities team at the Packard Foundation works to ensure that every young child, from birth to age five, grows up healthy and ready for kindergarten. As a Program Officer and Manager, I oversee a portfolio within this goal that includes two strategies to make that vision a reality.

Starting Smart and Strong is a 10-year place-based strategy that supports three California communities working to improve the quality of early learning and developmental experiences – in both formal and informal settings – by bringing together public and private partners to create comprehensive early learning systems and scale what works.

Through our Family, Friend, and Neighbor caregiver strategy, we partner with organizations and networks in California and beyond that support quality adult-child interactions for informal caregivers and children. The family members, friends, and neighbors who care for our youngest children often go unnoticed, but the care they provide in home-based and informal settings is an essential part of today’s childcare system. Our 10-year strategy aims to meet these caregivers’ desire for information and resources and to connect them with other caregivers who can support them in creating stimulating and rich learning experiences for children.  

In what ways has learning and evaluation contributed to your work?

Developmental evaluation and our partnership with Engage R+D in this work have been key to Starting Smart and Strong. When we started, we had an emergent strategy and a clear north star. However, each community we worked with had a unique perspective and unique needs, so each charted its own path to get to that north star. This was a complex strategy as we set out to support three different communities’ systems change efforts over 10 years. We knew we needed an evaluation approach that accounted for that complexity – one that prioritized meaningful learning and reflection as well as authentic partnership with communities – and that we had to be nimble, creative, and flexible. Put simply, we were certain that a traditional evaluation was not going to be the right approach. So, we engaged in a developmental evaluation to help guide the arc of our strategy and to help us uncover the real-time insights we needed to adapt to the complexities of the work as it unfolded.

For our Family, Friend, and Neighbor strategy, we set out to test different approaches to engaging informal caregivers. Evaluation was instrumental in helping us learn what approaches were not just successful, but also scalable. We also learned what didn’t work, which was equally important to inform our work. Through evaluation, we uncovered that the way our community partners defined scale was different from how we defined it at the Foundation which gave us insight into what was most important to our partners in their scaling journey. I truly believe that made us better – and more thoughtful – partners.

What shifts are you seeing in evaluation and/or philanthropy and what promise do those hold?

I’m seeing a shift in the way philanthropy is acknowledging that people don’t lead single-issue lives. We’re living through a moment of change and upheaval – multiple, intertwined crises are having a profound impact, both globally and locally. As a field, we’ve gotten better at exploring the intersections of the issues we’re working to address. 

At the Packard Foundation, this perspective led us to take a close look at the complex systems that drive the issues we’ve long worked to solve. We’ve just completed a strategic planning process to evolve our organization and re-focus our priorities so we can better meet the urgent challenges of our world today. The convergence of threats to our U.S. democracy, worsening climate change, the pandemic, persistent racial injustice, the assault on women’s rights, and deep inequities in outcomes for families and children have inspired passionate conversation within our Foundation to consider how our funding can have the greatest impact to meet the extraordinary challenges of our time.   

We know that working issue-by-issue is no longer sufficient to solve the complex dynamics and underlying root causes threatening people, communities, and the planet. Most importantly, the interconnected, increasingly urgent challenges of the day make clear that, when the institutions, structures, policies, and practices that form the bedrock of societies are unjust and inequitable, we can’t make and sustain progress.

What do you hope to see shift even more and what might it take to get there?

I’ve been excited to see how funders are rethinking how to work in partnership with communities. I think we have collective buy-in on shifting how we share power, but what that looks like in practice is new and evolving. I would love to see the field genuinely engage in power sharing. Getting there will take a persistent focus on the root causes and systems underlying key issues, transparent organizational commitments to working in new ways, and an openness to authentically partnering with grantees and communities. We really have to center the voices of the people at the heart of our work. It’s easy to say that we do, but it’s time for us as a field to live that value. 

Power sharing would mean a different approach to evaluation too – communities must have a say in what they’d like to see evaluated and whether strategies are working for them or not. And if we want big, bold changes, we can’t be afraid of failure. Instead, we have to adopt a true learning mentality: What’s working, and what isn’t? What do we need to do differently?  As funders, we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable and really embrace this opportunity to redefine what’s possible for our field.