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.
Implementing systematic feedback loops
Funders can listen to and learn from community through building the capacity of their nonprofit partners to implement high-quality, systematic feedback loops. More than 130 funders have sponsored their grantees to participate in Listen4Good (L4G), a program helping nonprofits gather data on client experience to improve outcomes and advance equity goals. Funders can also tap into community voice through L4G-coordinated learning cohorts and partnering with grantees as they review client feedback data.
Resources to shift power
Get inspired by what other funders are working on
The Colorado Health Foundation’s annual survey of nearly 3,000 Coloradans helps shape strategy. In recent years, residents have identified the rising cost of living, the cost of housing, and homelessness as the most serious problems facing the state. In response to those results and other input from community, the foundation added a new priority area, Economic Opportunity. And it is relying on additional listening efforts, such as interviews and focus groups and its staff’s continued community engagement, to inform its work in that area.
Says Tracey Stewart, a senior program officer: The survey data, “point us in a certain direction and then we start knocking on the doors of the people we need to meet to understand, plan, and act.”
Grantmaking
Based in part on learnings from its participation in Listen4Good, when it sponsored nine grantees building feedback loops with clients, The Boston Foundation itself made some changes, creating a staff position to focus on participatory grantmaking practices, including a new grant program designed to be informed by community voice.
Strategy development
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation considers itself an experienced donor in the field of family planning, yet when its Gender Equity and Governance Program was refreshing its strategic plan, the foundation turned to design thinking, a way of problem solving by deciphering what people really want through watching and listening. Hewlett brokered a partnership between IDEO.org and Marie Stopes International to engage adolescent girls in Zambia in project design. The result was a new approach that better connected with teenagers around issues of reproductive health.
ReWork the Bay, which focuses on economic equity and justice, transformed from doing work as a traditional funder collaborative to a collaborative led by what they call “proximate leaders” who serve on their Equity at Work Council (EWC). The EWC, a 17-member body of people with experience in economic justice, education, workforce development, small business, and philanthropy, leads ReWork’s programmatic strategy, generates policy and systems change recommendations, approves the budget, and makes final decisions on grants.
Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) created a Community Advisory Council of 24 local leaders of color to advise the community foundation on grantmaking strategies, identify emerging leaders, and provide frank feedback on whether the funder is authentically there for the community and following its lead. The group, which had a hand in SVCF’s latest strategic plan, convenes four times a year following agendas members set and carry out. “We went from a transactional listening practice — where we asked members to come to our meetings and tell us what they think we should do — to relational practices where conversation is dynamic, fluid, and not predetermined, and where learning is made within the engagement,” said Mauricio Palma, SVCF’s director of community building.
Get inspired, get informed, and take action!
Try out the menu’s three different entry ways to find the examples, resources, and reflections best suited to help you and your organization make the changes you want to see.
About this collection
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 foundations and 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 with a willingness to turn kernels of ideas into something right for you, using the recommended resources to get you thinking and going. 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 for more funder examples to feature in this Funder Listening Action Menu. Please take a few minutes to share your suggestions at We welcome your suggestions on our Lift Up Listening online form.
