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.
Listen4Good Impact Story: Outreach
Over five years starting in 2008, Outreach, a Pennsylvania nonprofit, provided GED classes to nearly 1,000 inmates at Lackawanna County Prison. But when Outreach was unable to renew its federal grant and its pleas to prison leadership to help find resources were rejected, it shut down the popular program in 2012. Then, six years later, the organization hit on the missing ingredient in making its case: client voice.
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Listen4Good Impact Story: 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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Funder Perspectives on Listening: Why Listen4Good?
In the first video of a series, Jennifer Aronson at The Boston Foundation describes how feedback can advance equity: “We’ve been on a journey to grapple with and understand the systemic and structural forces that create inequity in the sector … And Listen4Good is a great opportunity to disrupt those dynamics.”
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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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Funder Listening: Moses Taylor Foundation
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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"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.