Between 2014 and 2020, Oregon Community Foundation (OCF) invested almost $4 million to improving children’s dental health, including funding school-based dental health programs across Oregon. As members of the OCF Research and Learning Team, Kim and Madeline evaluated this effort, culminating in the report Learning what Works for School-Based Dental Health Programs. We worked closely with OCF’s program staff to foster a robust grantee learning community, evaluate and document the initiative and its grantees’ learning and outcomes, and collectively determine the strategic direction moving forward.

Over the course of the initiative, we developed numerous reports about individual programs, initiative progress and impacts, and lessons learned. We also created landscape scans and policy scans. These reports often combined qualitative and quantitative data, including both original and publicly available data, placing the grantees’ work into context, demonstrating the scale of the issue, and helping us understand Oregon’s work compared to that of other states. Content was informed by interviews, grantee reporting, data from the Oregon Healthy Authority and other data sources. Primary audiences were the Foundation, its board, grantees and partners. We also turned the lens on the foundation itself, describing OCF’s evolving approach and helping OCF understand its role within Oregon’s dental health system.