Tools & Resources to Shift Power to Communities
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Looking at your role/function within your foundation.
What are listening practices that can shift power?
Assess how you are listening through a set of reflection questions.
Are you a trustee or do you work with trustees?
Trustees have unique opportunities and power to drive change — promoting listening that shifts power. They also have the potential to be transformed themselves — adopting new approaches and mindsets around stewardship, power dynamics, and philanthropy writ large.
We’ll have more resources and examples coming soon. In the meantime, you may find content provided in this menu for donors applicable to your work.
Get going with this resource
This framework invites boards to orient governance around purpose, positive social impact, and meaningful connection with community. It emphasizes “authorized voice and power” — the principle that organizations must be informed and authorized by those impacted by their work.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
After Eileen Farbman inherited a family foundation she describes as conservative, she, her husband, and their son set out to turn it into something different, something “outside of the harmful practices they had seen in philanthropy and giving at large.” They would go on to create the Kolibri Foundation, working alongside three leaders in movements at the intersections of gender, racial, and economic justice, who also became trustees.
With bylaws at the new entity requiring that family members always represent a minority on the board, two additional movement leaders joined the original three alongside the three Farbmans to comprise the governing board.But even before the Farbmans reached outside the family to work on the foundation, they looked inward, clarifying commitments to communicate openly; be mindful of their own intentions and emotions and those of others; and to be inspired, challenged, and grateful. The result, a two-page document hashed out over a weekend workshop with consultants, was a set of “Shared Agreements” that the family continues to revisit regularly.
Says Farbman: “We felt we could not minimize the importance of family dynamics before stepping into relationships across class and race.”
In addition to the family agreements, the full board created a separate set of “Shared Community Agreements,” which is read before every board meeting. One of the agreements, which is about honoring opinions “rooted in different vantage points,” tells board members to “not let fear of power dynamics prevent us from saying what we think must be said.”
Explore this menu to spark the changes you want to see.
Mix and match to find the examples, resources, and reflections best suited to help you and your organization shift power to the people and communities at the heart of your work.
Have questions about the menu or ideas for resources or examples?
Please reach out to our communications manager, Debra Blum.
