Duke Sanford School of Public Policy

The ever-growing complexity of our social sector, together with the power of the Internet and the disengagement of government, has created a decentralized model of social change. As a result,

The shift away from a philanthropic paradigm based on demonstration projects and government-sponsored replication has also fundamentally altered the role of evaluation in philanthropy.

Given the rise of neoliberalism over the last twenty years—the extension of the market into every sphere of life—it’s no surprise that civil society has begun to receive the same

Is there anything more frightening to foundations than democracy?

In an ideal world, an experimental evaluation or randomized controlled trial (RCT), which compares participants in a program to a randomly assigned control group, provides the highest standard of p