Learning Blog: Reflections on 2025
A new year is often the best time to consider setting new goals. Yet, an essential part of embarking on new goals is reflecting on the past year’s progress and lessons learned. As a learning organization, the Foundation believes learning goes beyond traditional forms of knowledge acquisition and training. Learning also means using evaluation and reflection practices that foster a culture of curiosity, empowering us to make evidence-informed strategic decisions that improve our own organizational capacity.
That’s why as members of the Foundation’s Research, Evaluation, & Learning (REaL) team, we continuously encourage staff to reflect on themselves, their individual work, and the work of their team(s). We ask that they consider our learnings about internal processes, intended and unintended results of our work, how we’ve refined our strategies during the year to carry us forward into the rest of our strategic plan, and how we can continue to strengthen our evidence-informed decision-making processes toward systems change and the building of strong partnerships. In the interest of modeling what we ask Foundation teams to do themselves, we offer here some reflections (i.e., learnings) from REaL team members from 2025.
Learnings about Foundation strategies
Dr. Susie Paterson: The Foundation is starting to embrace the complexity of becoming a learning organization. This means we must work to align the efforts of our various teams and reflect on not just our individual projects, but how the sum of the work we do helps move us closer to a thriving community. I’m so proud of our progress toward moving in this direction. One key thing we’ve learned is that the “how” of our work is just as important as the outcomes we seek to influence. We are constantly trying to ensure that our internal processes reflect the way we work in community. This looks like working more in sync with other team members, spending more time reflecting on our work, and making sure that our reflections are tied to action. Overall, good processes lead to good outcomes.
Dr. Stephanie Rosado: As the Foundation continues to work to deepen our commitment to learning, we’ve recognized the value of pacing as a critical component for success. This past year affirmed that creating space for reflection is just as important as driving forward ambitious initiatives. Some of our most impactful efforts emerged when we balanced action with intentional learning. This approach is one we’re excited to carry into 2026 as we embed and institutionalize effective learning practices across our work.
One way we committed to this path in 2025 was by introducing “Before Action Reports” (BARs) and “After Action Reports” (AARs). These tools were designed to help us pause before launching a project and reflect afterward, capturing insights that inform strategic planning and ultimately strengthen future initiatives. Implementation of these tools revealed opportunities to enhance their depth and utility. We experienced first-hand that learning tools are most powerful when they go beyond compliance and truly spark curiosity and dialogue. Moving forward, we see this as an exciting opportunity to refine these practices so that they better serve their purpose of supporting evidence-informed decision-making and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
Learnings about… learning!
Dr. Susie Paterson: One of the things that the Foundation is working to implement is an organization-wide learning agenda. We are intentionally connecting our learning work with strategy by creating forward-facing questions that guide us in our commitment to healthy, positive systems change. Building a learning agenda isn’t as simple as deciding on topics we are interested in; it requires us to dive deep into our assumptions and hypotheses about our role as a foundation, our community, and how systems actually change. Our team has taken the leap to engage in this type of work, showing a real commitment to becoming an effective learning organization.
In addition to the internal work we are doing as an organization, Stephanie and I were selected to participate in a retreat with other foundations around the world to begin to conceptualize what an effective learning philanthropy looks like. It becomes clearer every year that collaboration and sharing experiences is one of the best ways to learn. We were fortunate to spend time with other organizations that have also been intentionally thinking about the importance of learning in creating sustainable community change.
Dr. Stephanie Rosado: As an emerging evaluation and learning professional, one of my deepest learnings from 2025 stems from the realization that the institutionalization of learning practices within philanthropic organizations is, generally speaking, in its infancy. Organizations and learning professionals are working hard to understand the most effective way to document best practices, standardize learning procedures, and create some uniformity and consistency within the field. However, this becomes difficult and nuanced as one considers the unique characteristics of each community a philanthropic organization may serve, the broad range of assets each organization has, the scope of each philanthropic organization’s work, the availability of internal staff vs. external consultants, the presence and strength of buy-in for learning practices, and so on. This realization has created more clarity and, honestly, more questions around my role at FHSP—in a good way! I feel a greater sense of responsibility to help contribute to the field and advance the work of learning so that it can become an even more ingrained aspect of philanthropic practice.