The Lenses That Shape Our Work

When I was a freshman in high school, I saw an eye doctor for the first time and learned I was severely nearsighted. I walked away with new glasses and a fresh perspective on the world around me. The outlines of the leaves on the trees, the street signs, and even people’s faces from a distance. Everything was crisp and bright. And I had no idea what I had been missing.

I’ve heard the analogy that we view the world through all of the eyeglasses we wear. One pair represents the home we grew up in and how it shapes our sense of self. One pair is our political awareness and persuasion. One pair our faith. Another, any trauma we have experienced. Piled on top of one another, we end up “wearing” more glasses than we can count. Together, these glasses give us an outlook, or a perspective, that is unlike anyone else who walks this earth.It’s 100% customized for us.

I often recall that idea, reminding myself that I approach things differently and view the external factors around me from my vantage point.

When developing a Theory of Change (ToC) model, assumptions and context are critical parts of the building blocks. Assumptions are the beliefs or conditions you hold to be true about how and why change happens and what needs to be in place for the strategy to work. When we defined our strategy areas to foster the thriving of at-risk youth through mentoring and catalyze flourishing in a refugee/immigrant community, we looked to the experts and spent time evaluating the existing assumptions.

For the youth mentorship strategy, we identified these assumptions:

The incarceration of girls is counterproductive and increases their risk of future involvement in the legal system.
Race and gender discrimination against girls of color disproportionately leads to arrest and legal contact.
Gender responsive programming can more effectively address the unique drivers of the incarceration of girls, which include sexual abuse, commercial sexual exploitation, family conflict, and housing instability.
Girls deserve access to safety, healing, and opportunity in their communities.
Reaching girls at a younger age and focusing on education, leadership development, and self-determination will prevent the incarceration of girls as they age.

For our strategy to support the flourishing of a neighborhood, we identified:

Services that address needs through an individualistic approach do not change the fundamental conditions that allow people to thrive.
Individual problems (e.g., poor-quality schools, lack of employment opportunities, access to healthcare) do not exist in isolation, but feed off each other.
Focusing on social determinants can transform disconnected communities.
Place-based models address disconnection, identifying and strengthening weak or unsupportive social ties and institutions.

And then we looked at the assumptions we have at the Kinship Fund:

Provide financial support to nonprofit organizations that collaborate to address community needs through a place-based model, offering youth mentorship programming.
Facilitate and advocate to strengthen the nonprofits’ collaborative efforts.

While these assumptions do not encompass every possible scenario, they serve as our starting point. And in this process, we acknowledge the “eyeglasses” we wear, and we commit to continuing to interrogate our assumptions.

Also crucial to the development of the Kinship Fund Theory of Change (ToC) model are context and external factors. These two elements refer to the broader environment—social, political, economic, cultural, or institutional—that influences whether and how a strategy can succeed.

These are outside of our control, but they shape the landscape in which our work operates.

Understanding them helps you:

Ground your strategy in reality
Anticipate challenges and opportunities
Explain variability in outcomes

The Context and External Factors we identified include:

The conditions and factors that affect the social determinants of health are complex, including:
- Healthcare access and quality
- Education access and quality
- Social and community context
- Economic stability Neighborhood and built environment
Funding must be multi-faceted and supported by public and private sources.
Collaboration must include local public and private industries.
The Kinship Fund can help reshape and seed change, but community buy-in and support are necessary to sustain momentum.
Racial inequality and systemic oppression endure and hinder progress.

Just like evaluating assumptions needs to be continuous, context and external factors change and emerge over time. Keeping our eyes on the external factors at play should shape how we respond.

With these growing building blocks, we were ready to begin exploring what it would take to achieve our goal of practicing bold, community-driven, trust-based philanthropy that fosters meaningful, long-term partnerships, enabling everyone in our community to thrive.