Client: The Laudes Foundation
Dates: March 2023 – March 2025
Country: UK, Amsterdam, Switzerland, India
The Laudes Foundation has a highly ambitious and complex aim: to address both inequality and climate breakdown caused by the current global economic dysfunction.
To help the Foundation achieve its 2025 goals, we will provide ongoing support to help them understand their impact and identify how they can continue to learn from what is and isn’t working to adapt to current and changing circumstances.
By 2030, the Laudes Foundation aims to promote a climate-positive and inclusive economy across the sectors it works in. This means:
- a financial industry that takes into account its impact on all people and nature,
- a fashion industry that builds long-terms values of businesses workers, producers and nature; and
- a built environment industry that prioritises decarbonisation and inspires healthy living.
The Laudes Foundation works across the finance, fashion and built environment industries with individuals at all levels including policymakers, financial actors, businesses, producers and communities. This gives the Foundation a unique position to leverage its networks for systemic and transformational change.
However, to achieve real change, the Foundation recognises it must go beyond developing a robust strategy and partners; it needs to reflect, learn and adapt as it goes along. As such, it wants to partner with an organisation that can follow and evaluate the strategy over the next four years and provide regular, actionable and evidence based feedback.
Our role
We will continuously assess the implementation of the Foundation’s strategy and its effectiveness, providing points for learning to assist in progress towards its 2025 outcomes.
Our evaluation has three specific objectives:
- facilitate ongoing learning to maximize the effectiveness of the strategy
- test the Foundation’s Theory of Change
- identify which approaches (e.g. advocacy, scaling research and innovation) work best, when, why and in which context.
We will work at both programme and organisation level within the Foundation.
At project level, we will facilitate learning cycles to ensure that programme teams have the information that they need to adapt, as well as creating the space and evidence base needed for significant adaptations.
At the organisational level, we will bring together evidence and learning from across three programmes to provide an overall view of the Foundation’s progress, influence and effectiveness.
Methods and approaches
This is a Developmental Evaluation, which is an evaluation that is designed to support innovation and guide adaptation in a dynamic way in real-time.
We have designed our ways of working to be very collaborative, co-creating our objectives and deliverables with inputs from Laudes staff. The idea behind this is that the evaluation team is able to explore issues that are deemed most relevant and important to the Foundation’s staff. It also means the team can provide rapid, real-time feedback that can be used instantly for adaptation.
Although there are overarching objectives of the evaluation, our methodology means they are not set in stone and the team will continue to adapt and respond to new changes and the needs of the organisation.