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The W. K. Kellogg Foundation has had a long history of investing in leadership development programs. Recent changes in the way that the Foundation thinks about leadership have been accompanied by questions from our leadership team about how to evaluate leadership programs. These questions led the Foundation to commission the Development Guild/DDI, Inc. to conduct a scan to determine the current status of efforts to evaluate change-oriented leadership programs. The scan provided information about desired and unintended outcomes, approaches to evaluation, data collection methods, and data sources. We believe that funders and those who run programs will benefit from understanding the variability across programs.

Using a case study methodology this paper explores specific ways in which the battered women's movement in Texas was affected by state funding. State funding of movement organizations is a mixed blessing. It allows movement activists to stabilize the funding of their organizations and to have a wider political and social impact. At the same time, state funding expands the organizational field based on available resources, not common ideology. This expansion has the potential to threaten the ideological and political cohesion of the movement. The affects of state funding are mitigated when the movement's leadership has a feminist vision and engages in feminist practices that challenge the bureaucratic and hierarchical practices of the state's decision making structures by empowering movement participants to work together collectively towards common goals.

The dynamic nature of advocacy presents a challenge for evaluators to rigorously assess cause‐and‐effect relationships linking advocacy efforts to policy change. Contribution analysis, developed by Dr. John Mayne, offers a nonexperimental impact evaluation method for testing and validating contribution claims in a policy context with multiple actors and influences. Using two case examples, the authors share how they applied the steps of contribution analysis to determine with greater confidence the extent to which an initiative or campaign contributed to a policy outcome. The authors provide observations and tips for advocacy and policy evaluators on how to create a succinct, evidence‐based story about the contribution claim and how coalitions can use these stories to inform strategic decision‐making.

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