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.
Build nonprofits' capacity for systematic feedback loops
Funders can listen by building the capacity of their nonprofit partners to implement high-quality, systematic feedback loops with the people they serve. More than 130 funders have sponsored their grantees to participate in Listen4Good, a program we spun out in 2023 that helps nonprofits gather data on client experience to improve outcomes and advance equity. Listen4Good also helps funders tap into community voice by coordinating learning cohorts and creating customized client feedback reports to promote funders and grantees cooperatively reviewing the data.
These types of opportunities for indirect listening can enhance partnerships with nonprofits and lay the groundwork for activities that allow funders to hear more directly from the people and communities they seek to serve.
Get going with these tools and resources
- Resource organization
Feedback Labs incentivizes organizations to build strong feedback loops, provides tools and training to make gathering feedback common social-sector practice, and supports a growing community of feedback practitioners, funders, and researchers.
- Resource organization
Through Listen4Good, your foundation can support its nonprofit partners to gather data on client experience that can improve both client outcomes and, through shared learnings from the feedback, your own grantmaking.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
Charles Schwab Bank Charles Schwab Bank, which sponsors grantees to participate in the client-feedback survey program Listen4Good and pays additional grant money to cover the staff time associated with participation, also supports the nonprofits to collaborate in their feedback work and share key learnings with each other and with Schwab Bank.
For example, the bank has partnered with Communities Foundation of Texas and United Way of Tarrant County to sponsor a cohort of five human services nonprofits in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area to participate in Listen4Good’s capacity building program and learning community. The DFW community convened five times throughout the 18-month program, covering topics including survey design, strategic planning data, and feedback system sustainability.
Elaina Mulé, community development at Schwab Bank, writes that the learning community allowed the bank “to gain new insights on community needs while developing deeper relationships with our grantees.”
When NEPA Funders Collaborative organized in 2019, it set the goal of raising $75,000 from its members to support five nonprofits to participate in Listen4Good’s co-funded grant program. When $90,000 was collected, the group set aside the additional money for mini-grants to help pay for changes the nonprofits might implement in response to client feedback.
The Barr Foundation and The Boston Foundation hosted a one-day New England Listen4Good Gathering in partnership with Philanthropy Massachusetts to connect, learn, and build momentum for funders and nonprofits in the area implementing high-quality feedback loops. Similarly, the Mary Black Foundation, Episcopal Health Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, and Virginia Piper Charitable Trust are among other funders that have hosted one-time convenings of their foundation staff and funded nonprofits working on client feedback efforts.
NEPA Funders Collaborative, a consortium of grantmakers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, co-funded a number of nonprofits participating in the Listen4Good feedback initiative. The consortium — spearheaded by the Moses Taylor Foundation — held quarterly convenings for funders and nonprofits to share their progress and learnings around their efforts to collect and use client feedback.
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.
