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
- Rick Moyers
- Fund for Shared Insight
- Fund for Shared Insight
- Fund for Shared INsight
- Fund for Shared Insight
Get inspired by what other funders are working on
As part of its strategy refresh, Headwaters Foundation set out to hear directly from Western Montanans who face the greatest barriers to health. Partnering with a consulting firm, the foundation held five focus groups with “priority populations,” including rural and low-income families, single parents, Spanish-speakers, Indigenous women, and LGBTQ+ residents.
The conversations revealed that the most pressing barriers to health, wellbeing and civic engagement stemmed from struggles to meet basic needs – such as access to healthy food and affordable, quality child care – along with challenges navigating public services due to stigma, lack of information, poor customer service, and experiences of racism.
“We learned so much by listening directly to people with lived experience, without filtering their voices through nonprofit leaders or our own assumptions,” said Erin Switalski, Program Director at Headwaters. “We see ourselves as a systems-change funder, but we kept hearing that people needed their basic needs met before they could participate in that work.”
In response, Headwaters’ new strategy deepens investment in direct services while pairing it with support for policy, advocacy, and local leadership development—a combination that already reflects how many nonprofits, especially in small communities, operate out of necessity. These learnings also led to an increased focus on supporting nonprofits whose boards and staff include members of the very communities most impacted by health inequities.
Building on these insights, the following year Headwaters commissioned and released Supporting Our Neighbors: Understanding Who Uses Public Assistance in Montana, for How Long, and Why. This research aimed to shed light on public assistance programs and address the stigma and misinformation that surfaced in the focus groups, further informing the foundation’s approach to tackling systemic barriers.
While overall less than one-quarter of the number of grants from U.S. foundations for global efforts go directly to organizations with headquarters in the countries where the work is done, nearly all of Segal Family Foundation’s grantee partners are African-led, and all of the foundation’s program officers are based in the countries where they are making grants. Additionally, a board comprised mostly of representatives from former in-country grantees advises the foundation’s governing board.
“Communities that we serve are at the forefront,” says Sharonrose Msaki, a Segal Family Foundation senior program officer based in Tanzania. “They’re leading, their voices matter.”
She says she and her colleagues listen in formal and informal ways, including through regular conversations with grantees and community members in their primary language when possible. She notes that frequent interaction is key to relationship building and to gaining insights into the context and background of a community.
Such conversations led the foundation to adjust a grantmaking rule limiting the number of years organizations can receive funds. In Burundi, for example, where there is relatively little investment by private philanthropy, the limit is now more flexible. And in response to concerns about the limits elsewhere, Segal started a “Luminary Circle” to promote and amplify the work of its former grantee partners to draw the attention of other potential donors.
When the Mortenson Family Foundation was established in 1999, it operated much like many others — through a transactional approach and with more or less top-down decision making. One of its three grantmaking programs accepted applications by invitation only, and across all programs, foundation staff reviewed applications and proposed grants to the governing board, which ultimately decided how funds were distributed. Now, each program’s grantmaking committee consists of five community leaders and no more than four Mortenson family members — a deliberate structure that ensures community voices hold the majority.
The work of reconstituting the grantmaking committees was a collaborative process from the start: with the foundation making it clear that they “weren’t going to ask community members to sit at a table already set, but instead have them be part of determining what the grantmaking would look like.”
Before the foundation invited people to join the committees, it invited them — grant partners and applicants, community leaders, and anyone interested in the issues — to listening sessions where they shared their ideas about grantmaking and whom should be involved. Through that process and with input from committee members once they were seated, programs, like Mortenson’s Expanding Opportunities for Children and Families, were completely reimagined, with rewritten guidelines, revamped application processes, and entirely new review practices.
When The Ford Family Foundation learned that families in one of the Oregon towns where it works wanted stronger pathways to kindergarten for their children, it did not jump to a quick decision, such as to build a new preschool. Instead, the funder spent years supporting relationship-building in the community, creating dialogue to understand barriers around school readiness, and building trust and muscles for community organizing.
“If a new preschool was a solution we had prescribed for the community, would families really want to take their kids there? Would the town have rallied?” asked Kara Inae Carlisle, president and CEO of The Ford Family Foundation. “What Yoncalla did, through their own process, was begin to think about what they wanted for their community, what they wanted for their kids, how they wanted the school to operate.”
Pointing to Yoncalla Early Works, the community hub providing preschool and other services that was eventually built with the foundation’s support, Carlisle said she recognizes that the foundation could not have created it alone, or by simply providing funding. “We can’t grant-make our way out of any of these issues,” she said. Instead, for every effort the foundation takes on, she said, “we think about what power we want to hold and what we don’t want to hold,” and where the foundation can build capacity among others, especially by helping to activate the sometimes “invisible capital” within communities.
When The Ford Family Foundation began to shift its rural community building strategy from “leadership development” to “community development,” a new staff position — field coordinator — played a significant role in implementing the change. Neither program officers nor grant makers, field coordinators are remote employees charged with extending the reach of the foundation in the rural communities and regions where they live. These “ground truthers,” according to a report, “How Philanthropy Can ‘Go to Where the People Are,’” ensure that programmatic strategies never stray far from the realties in rural communities.
The Ford Family Foundation, which makes grants throughout Oregon and Siskiyou County, California, with a focus on rural areas, also maintains vehicles for other staff, who are also likely to live in rural communities, to travel around the state building in-person relationships and dialogue.
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.
