Listening to the People and Communities at the Heart of Our Work
Fund for Shared Insight is a national funder collaborative seeking to improve philanthropy by promoting high-quality listening and feedback in service of equity.
630+ organizations implement high-quality feedback loops with Listen4Good
Our signature initiative, Listen4Good, offers expert tools, coaching, and resources to direct-service organizations ready to improve their capacity to listen. Funders participate in Listen4Good as sponsors, co-learners, and catalysts in supporting feedback efforts, while also enhancing their own listening practices.
What We Do
Along with building capacity for high-quality client feedback loops in the social sector, our pooled resources provide grants, learning opportunities, inspiration, and community-building around participatory grantmaking, feedback research, funder listening, field building, and expanding feedback efforts internationally.
Why Listening Matters
We believe that funders and the organizations they support can be more effective, do more good in the world, and partner in the creation of more equitable outcomes if we are open to systematically listening to, and acting on, feedback from the people and communities at the heart of our work, especially those whose voices, historically and because of persistent systemic and structural racism, have been least heard.
Hear directly from funders, nonprofit leaders, and clients about the power of feedback to drive change and lead to more equitable outcomes.
Listen4Good Impact Story: Second Harvest Food Bank
When Augustin “Augie” Serrano makes deliveries for Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida, he especially connects with the veterans, many of whom are experiencing homelessness. As a veteran himself, Augie is seen as a trusted peer who shows up every week to help out. So when Second Harvest started participating in Listen4Good, a feedback initiative to gauge what participants think about its food-distribution program, it naturally turned to Serrano as a trusted partner of its own.
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#HowWeListen
Dress for Success Austin wants to hear directly from the women who come to its clothing boutique and participate in its career services about what they are looking to accomplish.
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Fulfilling Philanthropy's Promise
This two-minute video is the latest from our “Funder Perspectives on Listening” series featuring honest talk about why high-quality listening and feedback can lead to improved philanthropy. Here, funders talk about shifting from a charity mindset to a mindset of justice where funders and nonprofits recognize that the people and communities at the heart of their work are the experts in their own lives.
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"This is My Story"
In this powerful video featuring the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), a national organization that works with people coming home from incarceration, we hear Kenneth, Wilfredo, and Patricia – members of CEO’s Participant Advocate Council — tell their own stories of transformation. And we see how high-quality feedback, listening, and storytelling can transform an organization and lead to positive social change.
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Listen4Good Impact Story: ICAN
LaTroy Burras, a site leader for the Arizona youth-development organization ICAN, had just joined a new staff committee exploring issues of equity within the nonprofit. Describing himself as “a quiet person,” he says he sat at his first meeting and wondered what his impact — or the impact of even the entire committee — could possibly be. Then he thought about the students in his after-school program and how they had been voicing their opinions through ICAN Listens, a client-feedback process built through the organization’s participation in Listen4Good.
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How Listening Advances Equity
This two-minute video is the latest from our “Funder Perspectives on Listening” series featuring honest talk about why high-quality listening and feedback can lead to improved philanthropy. Here, funders talk about how listening and feedback can promote equity if the right practices and lenses are applied.