Listening to the People and Communities at the Heart of Our Work
We’re a national funder collaborative seeking to improve philanthropy by promoting high-quality listening and feedback in service of equity.
500+ 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, 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.
#Listening
When The Wright Center for Community Health, a nonprofit provider of safety-net healthcare, began offering primary care and dental services within a Scranton, Pa., middle school, the Moses Taylor Foundation, also located in Scranton, was interested and listening.
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The Voices Project at Akron-Canton Regional Foodbank
An Ohio food bank implements high-quality feedback loops, adding, as one client-turned-volunteer describes it, “love to the whole entire process.”
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#HowWeListen
Layla Zaidane, president and CEO of the Millennial Action Project (MAP), says filling out the How We Listen section of her organization’s GuideStar by Candid profile felt “very meta.”
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Listen4Good Case Study: FSL
FSL’s staff and leaders invested time and attention to Listen4Good’s full feedback-loop process, but they weren’t done after the caregivers’ survey. They wanted to hear directly from the clients themselves.
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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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#HowWeListen
In March 2020, WOW! Children’s Museum, in Lafayette, CO, had to quickly close its doors because of COVID-19 restrictions. But that didn’t mean it shut out the families and communities it serves. Within weeks, WOW! emailed a survey, sympathizing about kids being stuck at home during the pandemic and asking how the museum could help.