Funder Listening Action Menu

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.

Read more about how funders can listen alongside nonprofits →

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative has long supported an advisory committee comprised of young people with foster care experience. The advisory committee advises the foundation on its work to improve the child welfare system. Members of the advisory committee are Jim Casey Fellows who have completed the Youth Leadership Institute, an immersive leadership training program aimed at helping young people deepen their knowledge and skills so that they can drive meaningful changes in child welfare practice and policies, both for themselves and others.

To address concerns about the high rate of youth who age out of foster care without connections to people and resources that can help with their success, Jim Casey Fellows spent a year and a half examining data and participating in facilitated conversations to come up with solutions that informed the development of an innovative approach for new permanency pathways for young adults transitioning out of the system, called SOUL Family Framework. The Casey Foundation is supporting jurisdictions implement the SOUL Family framework through grant funding and technical assistance.

A second national workgroup comprised of young leaders and adults advises the foundation on its twice-a-year survey of 3,000 young people and other data that helps shape the grantmaker’s agenda around programs and policy work in 16 states and nationally.

Sandy Wilkie, a senior fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation, says committee members help revise questions and interpret the data: “They always say things we don’t expect, and it is so insightful and so influential to how we do the work.”

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. 

When the William Penn Foundation began its most recent strategic planning process, which it undertakes about every ten years, it started with a survey of more than 400 grantees and an additional 200 “grass tops” interviews with grantee and community leaders about the funder’s past grantmaking. To explore future areas of grantmaking focus, the foundation spoke with 116 community and organizational leaders, advocates, and researchers. Later, to market test the outlines of a plan that was starting to emerge against the priorities of the community, the foundation worked with consultants to have 254 additional conversations with community members, nonprofit and government staff, and researchers. At multiple stages, the foundation made sure to include people and organizations who weren’t coming to them with grant requests. William Penn posted program-specific summaries of the feedback on its website, and when the final strategic plan was ready in the summer of 2024, it hosted four briefings in neighborhoods around Philadelphia and online — attended by more than 1,000 people — sharing how community input had helped shape its decisions and inviting additional feedback and questions.