In 2021, MacKenzie Scott gave a transformational gift to Equal Measure. The gift was part of a $2.7 billion pool of grants to “high-impact nonprofit organizations” addressing historic inequities, empowering community voices, and building paths to economic mobility. Scott’s generosity was a testament to Equal Measure’s mission, and the organization’s valuable role providing essential “infrastructure” to the social sector: helping foundations, donors, and nonprofit leaders be more effective in achieving their goals.

Much has changed in the national environment since that Scott gift. The collective work of unleashing the potential of every person and community has gotten harder against an oncoming tide of high prices, accelerating technologies, and harsh political rhetoric and policies.

What hasn’t changed is Equal Measure’s unyielding commitment to help our partners navigate this terrain and, more importantly, reimagine the future.

Turning crises into opportunities is not new to the social sector. Since our founding more than 40 years ago, Equal Measure has helped frontline organizations, national intermediaries, and their philanthropic partners learn together and develop, measure, and implement some of the most significant initiatives in the field to expand opportunities for all.

Today, as communities grapple with drastic cuts to federal programs and funding, we stand ready to help organizations step into the void and create what comes next—with data, evidence, and community voice—so that the work to build a more equitable, more prosperous society continues apace.

From the past to today

I joined Equal Measure’s board in 2019, drawn to its rigorous approach to collective impact and place-based systems change, and its work with some of the nation’s most respected philanthropies and intermediaries. I stepped in as acting CEO because I believed in the team and mission.

As I learned more about Equal Measure, I was struck by how much the roots of Equal Measure’s journey paralleled—and even intersected—with my professional beginnings creating a new national program on the future of cities and regions.

A group of applied researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School founded Equal Measure during a period of outmigration and disinvestment from the urban core. They sought to revitalize distressed neighborhoods and strengthen the organizational capacity of nonprofits and institutions to drive change.

After spinning off as an independent nonprofit, Equal Measure (then the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning) began working with leading organizations to reimagine the future of community redevelopment—from Surdna Foundation’s Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Remaking Communities Initiative to the then-newly launched National Community Development Initiative (later Living Cities). In short, Equal Measure was born from a commitment to place, people, equity, capacity building, and creative collaborations that looked around the corner.

Over the years, Equal Measure has built on that legacy by being a thought leader on collective impact and systems change; pioneering ways to partner with philanthropy and nonprofits through strategy, learning, and impact; and deepening the values of trust and equity in engagements.

Partnering for transformational change

As I lead Equal Measure into its next chapter, we will build on our history as we collaborate with entrepreneurial nonprofit leaders and organizations to realize transformational change. Here are a few ways we help our partners.

We help partners pursuing long-term, national-scale initiatives define their theory of change and track and adapt to progress.

Equal Measure is proud to have served as long-term partners with multi-site, multi-year initiatives that test and scale bold initiatives, advancing collective impact both within communities and across national networks.

For example, we worked with StriveTogether, a national network of nearly 70 community partnerships across 29 states working to improve children’s economic mobility, from kindergarten readiness to postsecondary success. Together, Equal Measure and StriveTogether developed a Theory of Action that remains in place today. We pioneered quantifiable approaches to collective impact that helped local collaborations make change in their communities, including influencing $21.8 billion in public funding through policy wins since 2023.

Since 2014, Equal Measure has also measured what matters for the Aspen Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF), which supports 40+ collaboratives serving young people aged 16–24 not in school and not working, who face barriers to achieving their greatest potential. Our recent research found that by reconnecting nearly 23,000 opportunity youth in 2024, the Aspen OYF collaboratives saved taxpayers $441 million and society more broadly $1.2 billion in one year, as well as improving the well-being and economic futures of youth and their families.

We help partners identify effective strategies for achieving more equitable outcomes.

By bringing a culturally responsive and equity-informed approach to our collaborations, we ensure nonprofit investments and strategies are grounded in the lives of real people in real places.

We are working alongside a Central Texas foundation that is striving to reinvent the delivery of mental health services in the region, because clinical approaches are not reaching diverse communities, where cultural and generational barriers strongly influence perceptions of mental health. We are facilitating conversations between staff and community members to learn and bridge differences in language and experience. Those shared learnings are already shaping strategies for reimagining and expanding the way mental health services are offered in the region.

For the American Cancer Society, we evaluated their Health Ambassador program in Puerto Rico that aimed to get critical information about cancer screenings and treatment to populations at elevated risk for cancer. Our approach integrated community knowledge of the island’s history and culture to better tailor the program’s training, learning methods, and tools to community context, surfacing new insights that strengthened the model and its impact.

We help partners bring different institutions together for coordinated learning and action so that fragmented efforts result in more unified, field-level change.

We know grantee partners working toward shared goals can achieve wider, more meaningful change. To that end, we facilitate learning among partners so they can share lessons, improve strategies, and extend their collective impact.

For a decade, Equal Measure served as the learning partner for The BUILD Health Challenge^®, which brings together local residents, community-based organizations, health care providers, and public health agencies to transform community health outcomes. We worked with nearly 70 cross-sector partnerships across 53 communities to develop shared outcomes for assessing progress. Our facilitation helped the initiative learn and adapt as it tackled the root causes of poor health, from food deserts to shortages of quality, healthy housing. Today, BUILD has grown into a national movement for community-driven health equity.

Since 2022, Equal Measure has served as learning partner for the Gates Foundation’s National Scale Enterprise (NSE), one of the foundation’s most significant postsecondary investments. Seven nonprofit online learning institutions and universities are designing, implementing, and scaling innovative approaches—including the use of AI, predictive analytics, and non-academic supports—to help hundreds of thousands of students achieve postsecondary success. We provide regular, data-driven insights for the foundation team’s planning and decision-making. We also convene a community of practice where the NSE institutions learn from one another to improve their interventions and student outcomes.

We help foundation boards and leaders and make more informed strategic decisions.

We help foundation executives become more intentional, strategic, and bold in their grantmaking, including improving their internal systems and communications strategies.

The Johnson Scholarship Foundation helps students with disabilities, economically disadvantaged students, and Native students in the U.S. and Canada prepare for and earn a four-year college degree. Its leaders engaged Equal Measure to better understand the foundation’s programs and impact. Guided by grantees and staff, we defined a shared theory of impact, redesigned the foundation’s grantmaking and reporting to better align with student outcomes, and developed a data architecture and interactive dashboard to track investments and reveal portfolio-wide trends. Together, these tools are giving board members and staff a clearer, more actionable picture of impact, informing decisions and strengthening support for students.

We also partnered with the Boston Foundation on strategic communications and planning as it made a significant shift to explicitly commit to centering equity and closing racial wealth gaps. Equal Measure helped the foundation clarify its investment strategy for its program areas, including its core activities and the root causes and historical contexts informing its work. The result was a jargon-free narrative that let the foundation tell a cohesive, compelling story about each of the program areas’ “what, how, and why” as well as its grant and beyond-grantmaking strategies.

What’s next

Equal Measure is fortunate to work alongside national and local collaboratives committed to lasting change for families and communities. As our team builds on the best of our past and prepares for the future, I want to hear from you. Your ideas and feedback will help us become better partners.

The landscape continues to change, but our goal remains the same: to help philanthropies and nonprofits think bigger, act bolder, and reach further—so their collective efforts lead to measurable improvements in people’s lives.