About Hanh

Hanh Cao Yu is currently the Chief Learning Officer at the California Endowment where she is responsible for learning, evaluation, and impact activities, and ensures that local and state grantees, board and staff understand the results and lessons of the Foundation’s investments in its 10-year Building Healthy Communities initiative. Dr. Yu led the effort to establish and implement ongoing evaluation of Move to End Violence.

Prior to joining The California Endowment, Dr. Yu served as Vice President, Director of  Youth, Education, and Philanthropy Division, and member of the corporate senior management team at Social Policy Research Associates, where she oversaw much of the company’s research and evaluation work in philanthropy. Dr. Yu has expertise in qualitative and quantitative research in the areas of women’s philanthropy, leadership development, organizational effectiveness, policy evaluation, community organizing, and vulnerable populations. She has a wealth of experience in working with foundations to assess funding priorities, institutional change, program performance, and effective outcome measures.  At SPR, Dr. Yu played a lead role in number of other projects, including the Evaluation of The California Endowment Diversity in Health Evaluation Project, The Evaluation of the TCE Health Exchange Academy, and TCE Diversity Audit, Evaluation of the Kellogg Foundation’s Capitalizing on Diversity Cross-Cutting Theme. Dr. Yu is the author of numerous publications and is a contributing author to The Handbook on Leadership Development Evaluation (Jossey-Bass, 2006).