The Central Valley Partnership (CVP) was the centerpiece of the Civic Culture Program area of the James Irvine Foundation headquartered in San Francisco. Initiated in 1996 as a "partnership for citizenship," CVP had three objectives: (1) assisting and supporting immigrants seeking citizenship; (2) promoting active civic participation throughout the Central Valley's immigrant communities; and (3) building the leadership capacity and organizational resources available to Central Valley immigrants for addressing the problems they face. The target population for the initiative was primarily Mexican immigrant farmworkers with little schooling who have lived in California for ten to twenty years. Most of the CVP grantees were small community-based organizations. The initiative aimed to strengthen these organizations, build their capacities toward greater impact, and encourage mutual learning and collaboration among grantees. The Irvine Foundation's former Civic Culture Program director, Craig McGarvey, helped develop the Central Valley Partnership program and was actively involved from the beginning. When CVP was launched in 1996, the Irvine Foundation had not yet added an evaluation director, and evaluation was not built into the original grant making. The Irvine Foundation created an evaluation director position in 1998 with the expectation that the foundation would contract external, professional evaluation assistance to assess each of its major program initiatives. As a result of this new emphasis on evaluating major initiatives, in 1998-1999 the foundation contracted the Aguirre Group (a private company founded in 1982 by Edward Aguirre, former U.S. commissioner of education; www.aguirreinternational.com) to conduct a retrospective assessment of CVP during its first years and provide a foundation for an ongoing process of evaluation and program improvement within the learning network of the grantees. The evaluation was designed through a six-month planning grant that involved fieldwork to determine what could be and should be done, and included highly interactive negotiations with the Civic Culture Program director. The Irvine Foundation evaluation director was a resource and consultant on the evaluation process and design. [An earlier and different version of this case, without teaching questions, was published as "Changing Stakeholder Needs and Changing Evaluator Roles," "Evaluation and Program Planning," 2003, 26, 459-469. This revision is published with permission of "Evaluation and Program Planning."]