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.
Implement participatory philanthropy approaches
Participatory approaches center the leadership, wisdom, and voices of communities, shifting power from philanthropy’s traditional power centers (i.e., the donors and institutions that control the money) to the people and communities directly affected by the issues being addressed. Such approaches can be implemented in your grantmaking and across the entirety of a foundation’s functions, including governance, grants administration, and evaluation.
Remember that participatory approaches require trust among all parties. Make sure to invest in relationship-building to set the stage for the deeper partnership work that will be involved.
Get going with these tools and resources
- Resource
This guide offers practical tools, tips, and examples for integrating participatory learning into practice, e.g., by integrating grantee and community input, and addressing limitations in traditional feedback loops.
- Resource
This guide offers examples of different participatory practices and advice on the groundwork you’ll need to do — such as building trust and setting expectations — before you engage community members in participatory work.
- Resource
Find recommendations, checklists, templates and discussion guides on launching a participatory philanthropy process; a detailed case study with lessons learned; and reflections on how power shifts can happen in your philanthropy.
- Tool
This self-assessment helps gauge how effectively your foundation is incorporating participatory practices across all areas of operations, and to serve as a planning tool to increase your participatory work.
- Tool
This tool builds your foundational understanding of child and youth participation in philanthropy and provides resources, practical considerations, and reflection questions to help you implement meaningful participatory practices.
- Resource
This seminal guide looks at why and how funders are engaging in participatory grantmaking, sharing challenges, lessons learned, and best practices, and offers a number of case studies.
- Resource
This project shares case studies and a library of resources to illuminate what is (and isn’t) a participatory strategy and describe how funders and nonprofits have designed and executed participatory strategic processes.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
A partnership between the City of Philadelphia and the Scattergood Foundation, the Overdose Prevention and Community Healing Fund uses national opioid settlement money to address the harms of the opioid epidemic. As one of the foundation’s three “Participatory Funds,” the Prevention Fund is designed to involve impacted residents in decision making, such as through a Community Advisory Committee that helps set grantmaking strategy. A committee member’s experience of having lost a loved one to overdose led the group to reframe the fund’s grant focus areas to elevate needs around community and family healing.
In addition to the advisory committee, Community Granting Groups (CGG) in each of the fund’s neighborhoods of focus review applications and make selections for awards through a facilitated participatory process. CGG members, most of whom have been in recovery and/or have cared for a loved one in addiction, are careful not to evaluate grant applications based on grammar, spelling, or writing style, but rather on the organization’s impact. Members also share their personal experiences with organizations, as well as the reputation that organizations have in the community. Caitlin O’Brien, Scattergood’s director of learning and community impact, says this process helps identify organizations that are deeply rooted in their communities, and lifts up grassroots groups that do not have access to professional grant writers and other resources, which often causes them to be overlooked by traditional philanthropy.
“Ultimately money is power,” says O’Brien, “so we are working to move power into the hands of people who are most impacted by how these dollars get spent .”
Omaha Community Foundation (OCF) supports five Community Interest Funds run by committees made up of residents who are directly connected to or identify with the populations the funds aim to support. The committees are responsible for setting and guiding direction, determining the process for grant selection, making funding decisions, and selecting additional committee members. Prospective committee members apply to serve through an open application process and are selected by the existing committee members.
The foundation provides administrative support to the funds and capacity-building and other support to the committees and to grant applicants. It also helps committee members embrace their role as more than advisors or managers of the funds, but, what staff describe as “true owners of it.”
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.”
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.
