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.
Engaging in other large-scale listening activities
For funders committed to shifting power to, and sharing power with, those most impacted by their work, participation is key. Participatory approaches in philanthropy center the leadership, wisdom, and voices of communities. They shift 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.
Resources to shift power
- Fund for Shared Insight
- Rick Moyers
- Fund for Shared Insight
- Fund for Shared Insight
Get inspired by what other funders are working on
Sobrato Philanthropies collaborated with researchers to engage more than 120 grantees in focus groups to shape a participatory evaluation process to support its grantmaking strategy to advance economic mobility for Silicon Valley’s most excluded residents. In addition to influencing Sobrato’s view of what mattered and what needed to change, grantee representatives also played a crucial role in selecting the evaluation firms, sharing decision-making power and receiving compensation for their participation.
The Partnership for the Bay’s Future, an initiative of the San Francisco Foundation, grounds its participatory learning in four guiding questions meant to promote trust and mutual learning: how success is defined, who carries the labor of evaluation, who interprets the data, and why information is collected. By inviting grantees to define success, involving them in making meaning from data, and being explicit that learning is for improvement rather than funding decisions, the initiative creates space for honesty and relationship building.
At the Global Fund for Children, participatory learning is part of a broader shift toward trust-based philanthropy. Moving away from compliance-driven metrics, the fund emphasizes reflective, narrative-based reporting and acts as a “knowledge broker” across its network, such as through peer learning exchanges, partner-led research, and capacity-building initiatives, like convenings and retreats.
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.”
At the Better Way Foundation, a significant shift in governance has accompanied its evolving mission. Originally established by the Rauenhorst family in 1994 to support child well-being, the foundation, still guided by Catholic social values, has focused in on culturally rooted early childhood learning and development across Indian Country. Its governing board has flipped in recent years from majority family members to a deeper blend of family and community representation — currently three family members and seven community-based trustees, three of whom are Indigenous.
Executive director Nicholas Banovetz says board members are recruited to create all kinds of diversity, including in age, lived experience, and skill sets. One trustee, Zada Ballew, is a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi People, a PhD candidate researching and teaching Indigenous history, and chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Native American Alumni. Banovetz says her ability to illuminate and navigate the complex intersections between Indigenous communities and the Catholic faith has informed Better Way’s growing relationships with Native-led organizations and work in the area of truth-telling and healing.
“There’s always so much talk about transforming philanthropy,” Banovetz says. A governing board that honors both family legacy and community voice helps Better Way “lean into that desire for change.”
With its goal to deeply understand and advance racial equity and racial justice in Illinois, Grand Victoria Foundation commissioned a study to shed light on the challenges faced by Black communities across the state. The resulting report, Illinois Racial Equity & Racial Justice Landscape Study, identifies 81 Black population centers outside of Chicago and Cook County and more than 1,500 organizations actively working to improve outcomes within those communities, providing an important correction to a common assumption that supporting Black communities in Illinois means focusing on the Chicago metropolitan area.
The report and connected deliverables include in-depth profiles of communities, like East St. Louis, a historic city shaped by anti-Black violence and disinvestment, a community network map, and deep analysis of data collected from one-on-one conversations and focus groups with residents. Along with in-person listening work around the state by Grand Victoria Foundation’s staff and board, the report laid the groundwork for the foundation’s new Racial Justice Framework that centers community power-building.
At the crux, says Grand Victoria Foundation president Sharon Bush, is a “mindset shift” at the foundation around understanding who they serve: “I want Black people to see themselves in our work. That’s who we’re accountable to.”
The Tepper Foundation supports grantees to work with Listen4Good to build their feedback capacity. The foundation will use the aggregate feedback data from the Listen4Good grantees, which represent a subset of grantees in its Food, Housing and Health portfolio, to identify and respond to shared needs and gaps in services.
A regional family foundation in Arizona engaged Listen4Good to both build nonprofit family resource centers’ capacity across the state to listen systematically to the communities they serve and to share aggregate findings with the local ecosystem. Each center gathers feedback about their clients’ experiences with their services and uses that data to improve programming. The primary funder of family resource centers, a statewide early childhood agency, First Things First, uses the aggregate data from families surveyed to inform its own programmatic strategy and to work with system partners to garner more support for family resource centers across the state. The funding community also benefits from the aggregate data, learning how different segments of the community are served by the centers statewide.
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.
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.
