During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership provided opportunities for McCourt School graduate students to join the Center and conduct independent research. Hyla Jacobson served as a Pablo Eisenberg Public Interest Research Fellow, writing a case study on the Headwaters Foundation’s trust-based evaluation process.
Through her research on Headwaters Foundation, a Montana-based health-conversion foundation that creates community-led solutions to improve the health and well-being of residents in in the Flathead nation and Montana’s 15 westmost counties, Hyla focused on how trust-based philanthropy can help create a paradigm shift, specifically in an organization’s evaluation process. In seeking to “bend the power dynamics” that exist between foundations, grantees, and the communities they serve, Headwaters prioritizes people with lived experience, not the foundation, to define the problem, dictate solutions, and determine what success looks like in their community. (author introduction)