TERMS OF REFERENCE

External Evaluation of the STAR Project

Strengthening Trust and Resilience in U.S. Democracy – The Carter Center, Conflict Resolution Program (CRP) Democracy Program (DP)

The Carter Center is guided by a fundamental commitment to human rights and the alleviation of human suffering; it seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, enhance freedom and democracy, and improve health.

The Center is seeking qualified applicants to conduct an in-depth assessment of its Safeguarding Trust and Reconciliation (STAR) II programming from January 2024 through December 2026. This contracted position is scheduled for a four-month period, with a ceiling of USD $100,000, inclusive of all fees, travel, and data collection costs for both phases.

Proposal Submission and Evaluation of Bids – Limited RFP

Interested firms or consultant teams should submit: (1) a technical proposal, max. 4000 words in 12 pt font, with 1” margins (approximately eight pages, not including annexes) presenting their understanding of the assignment and context, proposed methodology and approach, workplan, and team composition; (2) CVs of proposed evaluation team member(s); (3) two examples of comparable evaluations, with references; (4) a financial proposal with a breakdown by deliverable, daily rates, and level of effort.

Proposals will be scored against the technical approach and methodological rigor (40%); team qualifications and relevant experience, including nonpartisan credibility (35%); and value for money (25%). The Carter Center may interview shortlisted teams.

Proposals should be submitted online to this website by midnight Sunday, October 25, Eastern Standard Time. Due to the quick turnaround required, only those with active permission to work in the U.S. lasting the duration of the evaluation will be considered at this time. Questions may be submitted until Thursday, October 15 at midnight EST; answers will be shared with all registered bidders.

To be considered for this opportunity, please upload all application requirements to the following website: https://thecartercenter.formstack.com/forms/star_external_evaluation

TERMS OF REFERENCE

Commissioning organization	The Carter Center – Conflict Resolution Program (CRP) and Democracy Program (DP)
Project under evaluation	STAR II (successor to the Safeguarding Trust and Reconciliation initiative launched in 2020)
Evaluation type	External Program Evaluation
Evaluation period covered	January 2024 – December 2026
Geographic scope	Core states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin; observation states: Georgia, Montana, New Mexico; and new DRNs (Nevada and Pennsylvania) and NEO expansion states (Nevada and Michigan)
Anticipated timeline	November 2026 –February 2027
Budget	Ceiling of USD $100,000, inclusive of all fees, travel, and data collection costs for both phases
Submission website	https://thecartercenter.formstack.com/forms/star_external_evaluation
Submission due date	Midnight, Sunday, October 25, 2026
Deadline to submit questions	Midnight, Thurs., October 15, 2026

1. Background and Project Overview

In 2020, amid growing concerns about democratic backsliding and rising political violence, The Carter Center began an unprecedented program of work to mitigate violence and protect public confidence in democracy in the United States. Building on lessons from the 2022 and 2024 election cycles, STAR II is jointly implemented by the Center’s Conflict Resolution Program (CRP) and Democracy Program (DP), in coordination with the Human Rights Program (HRP), Rule of Law Program (RLP), Mental Health and Caregiver Program (MHCP), and Communications.

STAR II pursues four core objectives: 1) increase civic engagement in activities that protect and strengthen democratic norms, making anti-democratic and violent behavior less acceptable; 2) enhance the capacity of local actors, institutions, and networks to mitigate political and identity-based violence and build democratic resilience; 3) increase trust in well-administered elections; and 4) ensure targeted core institutions of a functional democracy are more responsive to and representative of public needs.

The project’s theory of change is organized around five mutually reinforcing activity blocks:

Activity Block 1: Democracy Resilience Networks (DRNs), (CRP lead): sustaining cross-partisan networks of more than 5,750 members across six states, localizing mature networks to in-state host institutions, and franchising up to eight new state networks through competitively selected CSO subgrantees.

Activity Block 2: Information resources (joint): countering electoral mis- and disinformation, community conflict response plans, and conflict-sensitive communication.

Activity Block 3: Nonpartisan election observation (DP lead): citizen observation in Georgia, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada and Michigan, expanding to two to three additional states in 2028, with federal-level scenario planning and monitoring.

Activity Block 4: Cross-program collaboration (joint): coordination with the Carter Center’s Human Rights, Rule of Law and Mental Health Programs on their US-based programming, as well as Carter Center subgrantees, including the Principles for Trusted Elections and the National Alliance for an Enduring Democracy.

Activity Block 5: Public engagement (joint): Convening and engaging stakeholders through public and closed-door events, workshops, and activities focused on civic education, election administration, and depolarization. This block also mobilizes Carter Center–supported multifaith and youth-led groups to support democratic norms and values and to advance violence mitigation (Faith Forward Democracy initiatives). Finally, it drives national messaging with institutional partners — including the Baker Institute and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation, which support national convenings, electoral reform discussions, and related local observation efforts — and with Carter Center subgrantee Team Democracy, which promotes the Principles for Trusted Elections by disseminating relevant messaging to the public, and the Center’s democracy resilience and observation networks.

2. Evaluation Purpose, Objectives, and Use

The evaluation has two linked purposes:

Accountability and evaluative learning: provide leadership, board, funders, and partners with an independent assessment of STAR II results through the 2026 election cycle.

Forward planning: generate, for TCC staff and the broader community of practice, prioritized recommendations for the 2027-2029 period, particularly for DRN expansion and localization, election observation expansion, cross-program collaboration, organizational learning, operating arrangements, and future resourcing decisions.

Primary intended users and use: the primary intended users of this evaluation are CRP and DP leadership, the Evaluation Management Committee, the STAR II program team, and key partners. The evaluation will complement ongoing monitoring and learning support. The findings are intended for learning, accountability, and forward planning across the 2027–2029 period.

3. Evaluation Scope

The evaluation will assess STAR II from January 2024 through December 2026. The assessment will consider how the program was implemented during this period, the outputs and results achieved, and the factors that supported or constrained implementation and results.

Activities and Strategies to be Evaluated. The scope encompasses STAR II’s five core activity areas: (1) Democracy Resilience Network (DRN) activities; (2) information resource development; (3) nonpartisan election observation; (4) cross-program collaboration; and (5) public engagement. In addition to these activities, the evaluation will examine strategies and approaches that shape their implementation and results, including partnerships and stakeholder engagement, organizational and operational practices, adaptation and learning, sustainability and approaches to program expansion and scale.

Geographic Scope. Geographically, the evaluation covers STAR II activities implemented across the states in which CRP and DP operated during the evaluation period. This includes CRP activities in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and DP activities in Georgia, Michigan, Montana, Nevada and New Mexico, encompassing established programming as well as newer or expanded activities during the evaluation period.

Target Groups. Perspectives will be sought from CRP and DP staff and leadership; other relevant Carter Center staff and leadership; DRN members and election network members; subgrantees; host and partner institutions; thought partners; and relevant community stakeholder and constituencies, including youth and faith-based stakeholders.

4. Evaluation criteria and preliminary key questions

The evaluation will examine how STAR II operates in practice, the extent to which implementation is producing, exceeding, or falling short of expected results, and what can be learned to strengthen future programming, localization, replication, and scale. It will examine not only what STAR II has delivered by the point at which the evaluation will take place, but also how implementation arrangements, organizational practices, operational models, partnerships, contextual conditions, and adaptation have influenced the quality and effectiveness of program delivery. At the outset, an Evaluation Management Committee, composed of select Carter Center staff from CRP and DP, as well as other internal teams as appropriate, will be established to provide oversight and quality assurance throughout the evaluation while safeguarding its independence and impartiality. The criteria will be refined and prioritized during the inception period. They will draw on the OECD-DAC criteria most relevant to this evaluation — relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability, applied alongside learning, staff and partner experience, and scalability. Equity and inclusion will be integrated across all criteria.

Questions will be refined and prioritized during the inception period with the evaluator and approved by the Evaluation Management Committee.

Preliminary evaluation questions may include (to be refined and prioritized at inception):

Results, contribution, and relevance: How relevant were STAR II’s approaches, to what extent did it achieve its intended results (effectively, coherently, and efficiently), and what evidence is there that it contributed to trust in well-administered elections and stronger democratic norms across the 2024 and 2026 cycles?
Sustainability, replicability, and scalability: How sustainable, replicable, and scalable are STAR II’s results and models — particularly the localization of DRNs to host institutions and the expansion of networks and observation to new states — and what conditions support or threaten their durability?
Recommendations for 2027–2029: What evidence-based recommendations should guide CRP and DP decisions for 2027–2029?

Evaluation Approach and Methodology

Bidders should propose a design that integrates business processes and practice review, performance assessment, outcome and objective analysis, and organizational learning into a single coherent methodological framework. The evaluation should be utilization-focused, confidential where appropriate, mixed methods, and learning-oriented, with particular attention to generating recommendations that are practical and useful for program management, program adaptation, sustainability, localization, and potential scale-up.

The methods below are indicative and will be finalized with the evaluator at inception, once the evaluation questions are confirmed. Questions, criteria, methods, and deliverables will be kept in alignment, and the inception evaluation matrix will map each question to its criterion, methods, and data sources.

5.1 Methods

Desk review: project design documents, theory of change, governance documents, organizational charts, job descriptions, workplans, budgets, meeting records, decision logs, partner agreements, subgrant files, risk registers, MEL plans and indicator dashboards, learning summit materials, annual MEL reports, after-action reviews, communications protocols, and relevant internal guidance. The project’s existing performance and tracking data will be available for the selected evaluator/MEL partner, including: an indicator dashboard, biannual learning summits, annual network member surveys, subgrant after-action reviews, post-election impact reports of 2026, and results from a complementary MEL partner assessment report.

Business process mapping: map selected end-to-end processes, such as annual planning, state expansion, subgrant lifecycle, election-cycle decision-making, and other applicable internal and external processes.

Outcome harvesting across a sample of DRNs and observation networks, to capture emergent and unanticipated outcomes (e.g., de-escalation incidents, thought-leadership uptake, policy influence) with substantiation from independent sources.

Key informant interviews or focus groups with network members, subgrantees, host institutions, election officials, faith leaders, institutional partners, and Carter Center staff across programs, ensuring cross-partisan balance in respondent selection.

Participatory sense-making session with primary Evaluation finding users to validate preliminary findings and co-develop recommendations, aligned where possible with a scheduled learning summit.

6. Deliverables and Indicative Timeline

Deliverable	Description	Due
Inception report	Evaluation questions, final evaluation matrix, methodology, sampling frame, data collection instruments, analysis plan, ethics protocol, and workplan	Week 3
Data collection	Evaluation team conducts desk review and field work including interviews, focus groups as appropriate	Week 4-7
Data collection debriefs	Interim report; Presentation of emerging findings to CRP/DP management immediately following initial data collection phase	Week 8 (est. by end of January 2027)
Sense-making workshop	Facilitated session with the evaluation team and primary intended users to interpret emerging findings	Week 9
Draft evaluation report	Max. 40 pages excluding annexes; findings, conclusions, and recommendations mapped to evidence	Week 11
Final evaluation report	Incorporating a management-response-ready recommendations; accompanied by anonymized datasets and transcripts per the data protection protocol	Week 12
Learning products	4–6-page evaluation brief for partners and funders; slide deck; presentation at a learning session; presentation of key findings to TCC Executive Leadership	Week 12

All deliverables are subject to review and approval by the evaluation management group. The final report timeline should be sequenced so the evaluation concludes by Spring 2027, consistent with the project MEL plan.

7. Evaluation Team Qualifications

The Carter Center anticipates an evaluation team, collectively demonstrating:

Advanced expertise in evaluating peacebuilding, democracy, governance, or violence-prevention programming, ideally including U.S.-based civic or depolarization initiatives.

Demonstrated command of theory-based evaluation, outcome harvesting, and mixed-methods designs, with strong qualitative and quantitative analytical skills.

Deep understanding of the U.S. electoral and political context, including election administration, mis-/disinformation dynamics, and political violence research.

Demonstrable nonpartisanship. Team members must have no affiliations, publications, or public statements that would compromise — in fact or in perception — the cross-partisan credibility on which STAR II depends. Bidders must disclose any potential conflicts of interest, political engagements, or any prior work for partisan entities.

Experience conducting research with politically diverse and potentially at-risk respondents, including trauma-informed and conflict-sensitive interviewing.

No current or recent contractual relationship with The Carter Center that would compromise independence.

8. Management and Governance

The evaluation will be managed by the evaluation management committee. The committee will approve deliverables, facilitate access to documents and stakeholders, and coordinate scheduling around election-period sensitivities. The evaluation team retains full independence over findings and conclusions; The Carter Center may append a management response but will not alter evaluative judgments.

9. Ethics, Data Protection, and Conflict Sensitivity

The evaluation must conform to the American Evaluation Association’s Guiding Principles and The Carter Center’s research ethics requirements, including informed consent, voluntary participation, and the right to decline or withdraw.

Given the elevated threat environment facing individuals engaged in U.S. election work, the evaluation must include a data protection protocol covering secure storage, anonymization of network members and election officials by default, and safeguards against re-identification in a polarized information environment.

Data collection must be conflict-sensitive and cross-partisan in design and tone

The evaluation team must coordinate the timing of outreach to election officials and network members to avoid burdening respondents during peak electoral periods.

10. Estimated Budget

Interested firms or consultant teams should propose a budget no higher than USD $100,000, inclusive of all fees, travel, and data collection costs.

11. Proposal Submission and Evaluation of Bids – Limited RFP

Proposals should be submitted online to this website by midnight Sunday, October 25, Eastern Standard Time. Due to the quick turnaround required, only those with active permission to work in the U.S. lasting the duration of the evaluation will be considered at this time. Questions may be submitted until Thursday, October 15 at midnight EST; answers will be shared with all registered bidders.