Tools & Resources to Shift Power
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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.
Convene community advisory boards
In addition to changing the composition of governing boards, foundations can also take steps to listen to shift power by creating advisory boards composed of individuals impacted by their philanthropy. Your advisory boards should maximize opportunities to lift up the diversity of community voice, have a true share in decision making, and be shaped by, or operate through, participatory processes.
Remember that when working with community members in these new ways, it’s critical to build a culture that makes everyone feel welcome, supported, and able to contribute.
Get going with these tools and resources
- Resource
The key steps, things to know, and things to avoid laid out for you here apply to creating a disability advisory group, and are also relevant to building any kind of inclusive panel engaged in participatory work.
- Resource
This toolkit offers practical guidance, questions, and approaches for creating a community advisory board that can strengthen community empowerment, buy-in, and participation.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
The California Endowment engages young people living in California to serve on its President’s Youth Council, intended to center youth voices and help shape the foundation’s investments and culture. During three-year terms, council members provide community perspective and also get leadership, professional-development, and networking opportunities.
When ACT for Alexandria set out to establish a fund with a participatory-grantmaking approach, its first focus group with community leaders provided feedback that signaled the foundation did not yet have the track record or trust necessary for such an effort. In response, ACT slowed the fund’s timeline, prioritizing relationship building in its day-to-day work, creating more space for community voice, partnering more deeply with community-based organizations, and executing a community-centered strategic planning process for the whole foundation.
That process led ACT back to its plans for a participatory-grantmaking fund when members of the strategy planning team, composed primarily of Alexandrians with lived experience at the intersection of race, immigration, and poverty, agreed to work on the fund’s inaugural community advisory board.
The Indigenous Women’s Flow Fund (IWFF) convenes five Indigenous women — described as artists, seed savers, poets, organizers, mothers, daughters, and grandmothers — to shape the themes of grantmaking programs, identify groups to support, and make final decisions on grants. An IWFF report says, “By making space for Indigenous women to create their own practices, rituals, and relationships to giving, IWFF becomes an example of what is possible when communities are given the autonomy to design processes that work best from within their own cultures and wisdom.”
Amid the racial reckoning of 2020, the Libra Foundation joined with other philanthropy partners to launch the Democracy Frontlines Fund (DFF). Grantees are selected not by the funders, but by DFF’s “Brain Trust” of seven Black women and women of color who together have decades of expertise in funding frontline social-justice organizers. The group identifies and vets Black-led regrantors and national organizations working for systems change, which are then confirmed as grantees after additional due diligence by a special DFF team at Libra.
As with other GreenLight Funds across the country, GreenLight Boston relies on local GreenLight Selection Advisory Councils made up of for-profit and nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and academics, who act as expert partners and sounding boards to help decide which community-based organizations receive funding. In Boston, GreenLight’s model also includes a separate council of family partners who engage in a parallel process to the Advisory Council, sharing their opinions on what kinds of services they would use and how nonprofit programs impact their communities. Ultimately, the family partners join the Advisory Council to vote on what organization to support.
Dive into 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.
About this collection
We know that you and other funders are moving toward listening and participatory practices at different rates and from different starting points and perspectives. We also know that shifting power is not easy work and requires a strong internal commitment and continuous learning. It’s best to be clear on your organization’s motivations, capabilities, and goals. And as you engage with this menu, consider your funding practices, operations, policies, and values — and then where change will best serve your foundation and the people and communities you seek to serve.
We offer a range of examples and resources because there are no one-size-fits-all solutions; and we share them in a menu format so you can pick and choose what’s interesting or relevant to you. We don’t rank the practices or the organizations employing them or intend to signal that any featured funder has listening figured out or listens well across the board. Each example represents only a moment in time — a practice one of your peers told us (or an intermediary) about, and that we hope might inspire you to enhance your own listening work.
Similarly, we do not rank the recommended resources, though we did select them based on a set of criteria, including:
- We and/or our partners have personally used the resource and find it is high-quality, promotes impact, and aligns with our power analysis
- The resource is widely and publicly available (not just to paid members) and, ideally, accessible to people with disabilities
- The resource is relevant to, and includes applicable lessons for, a variety of types of funders
- The resource is as evergreen as possible
New resources are always coming online. We hope that the ones we've included are helpful while also sparking your curiosity and helping you forge an ongoing relationship with the creators and other aligned efforts.
We encourage you to examine the menu’s resources and examples with a willingness to turn kernels of ideas into something right for you. We also hope you spend time on the reflection questions, which will help you and your organization better understand and prepare for what it means to listen to shift power. Checking out our Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit’s Funder Readiness Assessment will also help prepare you for changes in your priorities and practices.
We are always looking to add more funder listening examples and more resources. Please take a few minutes to share your stories and ideas on our Lift Up Listening online form.
Have questions about the menu or ideas for resources or examples?
Please reach out to our communications manager, Debra Blum.
