Funder Listening Action Menu

A year before the Ruth Mott Foundation hosted a series of community forums to gather input for a new strategic plan, it started gathering input to plan the forums themselves. The foundation formed a Community Engagement Committee (CEC) composed of 10 local residents from a variety of backgrounds to advise the feedback and collaboration processes. Committee members met once a month over dinner and were paid a stipend of $1,500 each.

A team of foundation staff rotated to guide meetings, which started with building relationships between CEC members and staff, using activities such as “I Am” fill-in-the blank poems and creating a collective playlist. Participants built context around the foundation’s mission, vision, values, and held one of their meetings at Applewood, the historical Mott family estate, to familiarize CEC members with the space. The group explored what they liked or didn’t like about engagement sessions they had participated in before, which helped shape the vision for the foundation’s forums. They also helped select venues, suggested outreach strategies, and tried out the activities staff designed based on their input. Above all, writes senior program officer Elizabeth Jordan, “they admonished us not to be boring.”

Founded in 1997 as the Consumer Health Foundation, iF, A Foundation for Radical Possibility renamed itself in 2021 to reflect its decades-long evolution from a traditional funder to a community-centered philanthropic partner dedicated to racial justice. The foundation describes its philanthropy as grounded in the belief that those who live at the sharpest intersections of systems of oppression, particularly race, class, and gender identity, should have decision-making power over the distribution of resources in their communities.

The foundation has community members on its governing board and in other leadership positions, implements participatory grantmaking, and works to be in close relationship with grassroots and frontline activists, supporting their organizing, coalition building, and advocacy.

Among those efforts, iF supports a coalition of leaders and organizations advocating for reparations for Black people in Washington, D.C. Upon the invitation of the D.C. Council, iF provided testimony in support of the case for reparations. The city’s reparations legislation passed in 2025, and the coalition is now fighting for its funding and implementation. The foundation continues to work with the coalition on reparations and the broader fight for economic justice.

iF also continues to pilot a worker-led guaranteed income project for D.C.-area hospitality workers who lost their jobs due to COVID-19. Let’s GO (Guarantee Opportunity) DMV! centers workers and includes a strong narrative component to help make the case for permanent, government-supported guaranteed income. The foundation works in partnership with the DC Guaranteed Income Coalition and other pilots and coalitions throughout the region and across the country.

To center community voice in its latest strategic plan, the Horizon Foundation, which focuses on health equity in Howard County, Maryland, interviewed more than 100 grantees and leaders of other local institutions to hear their perspectives about the needs of the community and how to address them. But the foundation wanted to also hear directly from residents, especially those facing the biggest health inequities: “We needed to go to the source,” foundation leaders said.

To do this, Horizon partnered with a Black-owned survey firm to conduct a random, representative poll of 400 residents of color earning below $85,000 annually to find out what stood in their way of achieving an abundant and healthy life. The foundation also hired a Black-owned canvassing firm with a diverse staff to knock on 17,000 doors primarily located in lower-income communities of color — of which 1,700 opened and residents there talked about their challenges. All who participated were given e-gift cards for their participation. Additionally, Horizon held a community summit where more than 400 residents participated in live polling, and held listening sessions with more than 100 Spanish-speaking residents. Collectively, this work informed decisions made on the new strategic plan by Horizon’s Planning and Evaluation Committee, which consisted of equal numbers of board members and community members.

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.