See what funders around the country are doing to listen well in order to shift and share power with the people and communities at the heart of their work.
Dozens of real-life examples highlight practices and policies that value lived expertise, improve grantmaking, and advance equity.
Get inspired by this collection of insights and ideas to spark the changes you want to see.
Introduction
Fund for Shared Insight promotes the idea that foundations and nonprofits can do more good in the world and have a greater impact when they regularly and deeply listen to the people and communities most affected by their decisions. Over time, as the listening and feedback field has grown more robust, the question we field most frequently has shifted from “Why does listening matter?” to “We recognize the importance of listening, but how do we do it well?”
We created this menu to help answer that question. It features a variety of ways funders are listening across the many dimensions of their work, and is designed to help you think broadly and systematically about how to listen, respond, and shift power to the people and communities at the heart of your work. We’ve drawn examples from a range of sources, including our own partner funders, media reports, and philanthropy-support organizations participating in our Funder Listening Community of Practice. Many are also drawn from the report “Bridging the Gap: A Review of Foundation Listening Practices” by the consulting firm Ekouté, which we highly recommend.
- Listening, like most things, can be done poorly or well. Shared Insight believes that listening well means:
Listening with a willingness to change in response to what you hear. - Listening to a broad range of voices, with specific attention to people and communities not typically consulted by philanthropy and nonprofits.
- Committing to an ongoing process, not a one-time activity, that includes closing the loop by reporting back on what you hear and how you plan to respond.
- Engaging with people and communities as partners throughout the process, from framing the initial questions to making meaning from what you hear to determining how to respond.
We understand that funders approach listening from different starting points. The frameworks outlined in the papers, Meaningfully Connecting with Communities in Advocacy and Policy Work, prepared for Shared Insight by the Aspen Institute, and Participatory Grantmaking: Has Its Time Come?, prepared for the Ford Foundation by Cynthia Gibson, may provide useful context.
As you review the examples in this menu, consider how your funding practices, operations, policies, and values either support or create barriers to listening well. And then take the learnings and inspiration offered here to make the changes you want to see.
The menu is a living document and we are always looking for new examples of funders listening well, so please contact us if you have suggestions or would like to be included.
1. Support grantees to listen well
2. Use listening and feedback to inform grantmaking
3. Use listening and feedback to inform strategy development
4. Use listening and feedback to inform measurement, learning, and evaluation
5. Use listening to learn directly from people and communities
6. Listen through participatory practices
7. Listen by changing the composition of staffs and boards
Funders can support grantee efforts – and explore how listening can inform their own grantmaking work – by sponsoring nonprofits to participate in Listen4Good, a feedback capacity-building program that provides expert coaching, tools, and other resources for organizations building high-quality, equity-focused feedback loops with those they serve. Funders can work alone or in collaboration with others to sponsor individual grantees or cohorts that together can share resources and learnings. In addition to that kind of direct support, there are significant ways funders can support listening by signaling to grantees how they care about and would like to promote listening. We encourage funders to ask about organizations’ listening and feedback practices – whether in the application process, during site visits, or as part of final reporting – because it sends the message that listening to people and communities is an expectation. We also recognize the power dynamics inherent in relationships between funders and nonprofits, so we encourage you to approach organizations’ responses with understanding. Grantees may, understandably, cite capacity constraints that hinder their feedback collection or ability to make changes in response to feedback. Make sure you are asking in the spirit of partnership and with serious intentions to use what you learn to change your own practices.
On the grant application, ask grantees how they collect and use client feedback
A sample of questions:
Q: Please describe how voices of historically excluded groups and/or individuals with lived experience are sought out and reflected in program decision making.
Q: To what extent does your organization listen to and obtain feedback from those you serve?
Q: How is this feedback used to inform delivery of programming and services (including your advocacy agenda, if applicable)?
Q: To what extent do you let those who provided feedback know how their input was used?
Q: How do you solicit feedback from your participants?
Q: Do you have a system in place to make changes to your program(s) based on the feedback received?
Q: How do you listen and learn from your program participants and obtain actionable information?
Q: Please provide an example of an improvement made to your program based on capturing the voice of your participants.
Include questions in your site visits about how the nonprofit listens to people and communities
During a site visit to a nonprofit that had applied for a grant to pay for security upgrades at its facility, the Plough Foundation suggested the nonprofit conduct informal surveys among staff, volunteers, and clients before and after the upgrades to inform plans for changes and then gauge how they were received.
Make capacity-building grants to improve nonprofit feedback practice
When NEPA Funders Collaborative organized in 2019, it set the goal of raising $75,000 from its members to support five nonprofits to participate in Listen4Good’s co-funded grant program. When $90,000 was collected, the group set aside the additional money for mini-grants to help pay for changes the nonprofits might implement in response to client feedback.
Collaborate with other funders to learn about listening and feedback
NEPA Funders Collaborative, a consortium of grantmakers in Northeastern Pennsylvania, co-funded a number of nonprofits participating in the Listen4Good feedback initiative. The consortium — spearheaded by the Moses Taylor Foundation — held quarterly convenings for funders and nonprofits to share their progress and learnings around their efforts to collect and use client feedback.
The Barr Foundation and The Boston Foundation hosted a one-day New England Listen4Good Gathering in partnership with Philanthropy Massachusetts to connect, learn, and build momentum for funders and nonprofits in the area implementing high-quality feedback loops. Similarly, the Mary Black Foundation, Episcopal Health Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, and Virginia Piper Charitable Trust are among other funders that have hosted one-time convenings of their foundation staff and funded nonprofits working on client feedback efforts.
When funders think about feedback and listening, they often focus on feedback from grantees about their performance and relationship. While grantee feedback is a critical practice to help funders improve, Shared Insight believes that funders can and should use insights gained through grantees’ listening efforts, as well as their own direct listening, to make better informed and more equitable grantmaking decisions.
After one of its grantees collected feedback that included concerns about clients’ interactions with staff supervisors, REDF created a new funding opportunity for the organization to improve its staff training. Then, seeing similar issues at other youth-serving nonprofits, the funder created a new grant program to pay for different approaches to behavioral-health interventions at six nonprofits.
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
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program helped coordinate six listening circles to better understand the perspectives of artists, cultural workers, and creative entrepreneurs around the Bay Area, in California, who have been underserved by arts grantmaking. The foundation reported back to the participants that it learned about valued cultural and artistic practices, and would reflect on those and how they can be recognized and supported as it refreshed its arts-program strategy.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation has run a fellowship program for young people who are paid to design programs and advise on grants for the foundation’s youth-engagement work. Casey has also included young adults in internal RFP processes.
Many foundations engage in strategic planning and other processes to develop strategies and establish priorities in multi-year cycles. These moments are an important inflection point when listening can be especially critical.
Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo undergoes a strategic refresh every five years, conducting a listening tour in order to re-examine its community goals. In one such effort, the foundation worked with community-based partners to engage community leaders, nonprofits, and residents through interviews, focus groups, and surveys. One result: instead of continuing with plans to invest in transportation and childcare, the foundation pivoted to focusing on systems change within education and workforce training programs to address the root causes of the challenges residents from low-income households said they were facing.
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.
When The James Irvine Foundation changed its focus to supporting low-income workers in California, it partnered with community organizations to hold listening sessions, reaching 400 residents (in 10 languages) across the state. The purpose of these sessions, attended by a mix of foundation board members, leaders, and staff from different departments, even IT, was to better understand individuals’ hopes, fears, challenges, and dreams. Foundation staff members described being indelibly changed by the events, saying they helped to ground Irvine’s work.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Performing Arts Program helped coordinate six listening circles to better understand the perspectives of artists, cultural workers, and creative entrepreneurs around the Bay Area, in California, who have been underserved by arts grantmaking. The foundation reported back to the participants that it learned about valued cultural and artistic practices, and would reflect on those and how they can be recognized and supported as it refreshed its arts-program strategy.
There are many ways of knowing, and Shared Insight believes that data gained from listening and feedback is just as valid as data from other monitoring and evaluation activities, and should be a component of how funders approach measurement, learning, and evaluation.
Omidyar Network worked with Lean Data to collect feedback — through phone interviews and online surveys — from 4,800 clients involved with 24 organizations in Omidyar’s education portfolio around the world. Among other findings, the data showed that clients of ed-tech organizations were most concerned with the depth and variety of content and the user experience, whereas clients of early-education organizations wanted wider choices in content and were most focused on the quality of the content. Omidyar shared these insights with other players in the sector and used them to advise their investees and guide their own future investments.

After participating in Listen4Good, REDF incorporated some of the Listen4Good survey questions into a multi-year study conducted by an outside research group evaluating the effectiveness of REDF’s job-preparation interventions. REDF also followed up by seeking additional feedback from employees at the social-enterprise businesses it supports.
Through its program, Listening to Mothers in California, the California Health Care Foundation gathered perspectives from roughly 2,500 people who responded to a survey focusing on the experiences, outcomes, and views of childbearing women. The foundation aimed to hear especially from under-represented groups, such as by offering the survey in both English and Spanish and by oversampling Black women.
Beyond listening specifically to support grant decisions, strategy development, or measurement, funders can embrace listening as a way of being that informs multiple aspects of their work and builds trust and a sense of partnership with communities.
Inspired by Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer, social-justice activist, and author who popularized the phrase “get proximate,” staff members at the Silicon Valley Venture Fund (SV2) have participated in community-led walking tours and discussions, shared a meal and conversation with residents in a transitional facility, and participated in a virtual reality experience meant to dramatize the challenges that foster children face.
For three years, the Satterberg Foundation and its partners convened an annual Seattle Equity Summit, bringing together more than 400 BIPOC community members, along with white allies and partners, to listen to each other, share social justice and political strategies, and network. The summits included representatives from business, government, and nonprofits, along with community members. The organizers recorded actionable items and reported progress back to the group.
To follow up on themes heard in its community listening sessions with low-income workers in California, The James Irvine Foundation commissioned a survey of more than 3,300 residents to gain insights into the unique experiences of different demographic groups (e.g., by region, age, race/ethnicity). Learnings from the listening sessions and survey were useful, but Irvine realized that the survey’s sample of Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders had painted dozens of nationalities and ethnicities as a monolithic group. To be able to see the unique challenges that exist among different groups, Irvine followed up with another survey, this time including 2,600 Californians from nine distinct AAPI ethnic groups.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds large-scale polls that, like community research, are intended to enhance the foundation’s and the broader field’s understanding of the people, communities, and environments where they operate. Hewlett sponsors Colorado College’s Conservation in the West poll, an annual survey of voters across eight western states about their opinions on conservation issues. It also funds the Ghana Center for Democratic Development’s work on the Afro-Barometer, a continent-wide survey of public attitudes on democracy and governance.
Building upon an initial wave of research that researchers, partners and community advisors felt wasn’t capturing the full story about how Black and African American respondents were participating in culture and creativity, the Barr Foundation and Wallace Foundation supported a qualitative phase of research (“Black Perspectives on Creativity, Trustworthiness, Welcome and Well-Being: A Qualitative Study”). The advisors, researchers, and funders saw this qualitative research as an opportunity to expand on what was learned in the first wave of research, as well as to determine how they might improve the subsequent “Wave 2” research to better reflect Black and African American experiences.
Listening is a foundational component of participatory philanthropy, a term that describes a range of practices and models in which people and communities affected by an issue become part of decision-making processes. There are many resources for funders on this topic, including those from GrantCraft, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and Shared Insight’s Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit. Here are some ways funders have put those ideas into action:
The David & Lucile Packard Foundation has been practicing participatory grantmaking for decades in Pueblo, Colorado, where David Packard was born and grew up. After five years of making grants in the region, in 1977, the foundation established an advisory committee of community members to steer decisions. The committee still meets three times a year to review grant proposals, conduct site visits, and basically do the job of a program officer. The committee’s work is now codified through a charter, members have term limits, and it is supported by a foundation staff member, an endowed position since 2018.
The Brooklyn Community Foundation has transitioned all its strategic grantmaking (more than $4 million a year) to be conducted in partnership with community members. It employs a participatory model, including through its youth fellowship program where young people run their own grant program, reviewing proposals, conducting site visits, and making recommendations. Through its Brooklyn Elders Fund, the foundation distributes money by incorporating the advice of a rotating group of older residents who work alongside program staff to inform grantmaking and advocacy efforts. And foundation staff work with an advisory council of residents personally impacted by substance misuse or who have worked with impacted communities to determine how money from a Wellness and Recovery Fund should be distributed.
During ongoing listening tours in Brooklyn neighborhoods, the foundation actively recruits participants for its advisory councils (members are compensated) so that, as the president Jocelynne Rainey writes: “[W]e have a continuous and powerful pipeline of community informants who can become community decision makers at their community foundation.”
As with other GreenLight Funds across the country, GreenLight FundBoston relies on local GreenLight Selection Advisory Councils made up of for-profit and nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, and academics, who act as expert partners and sounding boards to help decide which community-based organizations receive funding. In Boston, GreenLight’s model also includes a separate council of family partners who engage in a parallel process to the Advisory Council, sharing their opinions on what kinds of services they would use and how nonprofit programs impact their communities. Ultimately, the family partners join the Advisory Council to vote on what organization to support.
Amid the racial reckoning of 2020, the Libra Foundation joined with other philanthropy partners to launch the Democracy Frontlines Fund (DFF). Grantees are selected not by the funders, but by DFF’s “Brain Trust” of seven Black women and women of color who together have decades of expertise in funding frontline social-justice organizers. The group identifies and vets Black-led regrantors and national organizations working for systems change, which are then confirmed as grantees after additional due diligence by a special DFF team at Libra.
While much of this menu focuses on external practices, hiring staff and adding board members with lived experience is another way to shift power and bring new voices and perspectives into decision making. Here are some ways funders have done that:
Hire employees, interns, and consultants who have relevant lived experience
The Ford Foundation created a professional development program for graduates of the Bard Prison Initiative, a program Ford had long supported that gives incarcerated people an opportunity to earn a degree from Bard College while serving their sentences. Participants spent a paid year exploring career paths at the foundation and getting other supports, such as opportunities for networking and building technical skills.
When the Community Foundation of Greater Flint was looking for a new CEO in 2017, its retiring head knew the funder, as she told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “needed to involve community members who before had not been involved in our grantmaking decisions.” The board selected as the new CEO Isaiah Oliver, who had joined the foundation as a vice president three years earlier and had stood out for his leadership style, which included listening, consensus-building, and connecting with the people and communities the foundation serves. Oliver was the first Flint native to hold the post, telling The Chronicle that he grew up poor not far from a church-housed community outreach center that the community foundation supports.
The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation has piloted an internship program for young people who have experience in the foster care system, and it is developing a fellowship program to provide leadership and professional development opportunities for people with lived expertise in other issues areas where the foundation works.
Bring people with relevant lived experience onto your governing board
Through a community-based research process that tapped the wisdom of local movement
leaders and grantee partners, the Tzedek Social Justice Fund recognized that it needed
board members with direct experience doing the kind of work that Tzedek funds. Founder and donor Amy Mandel stepped down from the board, and Tzedek is now governed by a board of community leaders with diverse backgrounds and lived experience.
As part of an emergent approach that includes leaning into values around supporting individuals and community empowerment, in 2021, the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation held its first open call for board members. Six new people joined the board in this bid to attract more diversity and broader community representation.
The Samuel S. Fels Fund committed to recruiting board members more representative of its Philadelphia community, evolving its board over a three-year period to be 75 percent BIPOC, with more than a third of members born outside the United States. Fels also adopted a set of values that include: Trust that those most directly harmed by injustice are in the best position to know what is needed to address harms and to build well-being.
As part of a 2022 strategic plan that included a commitment to sharing power with grantees
and the community, Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2) appointed three nonprofit leaders to its governing board that had always been comprised only of donors who fund the organization. SV2 is also including for the first time community leaders on the panels making the grants recommendations that go to the board for final determination. And an initiative that will represent SV2’s largest-ever funding commitment will be identified and approved by a committee with an equal number of fully voting members representing donors, staff, and the community.
Bring people with relevant lived experience onto your advisory boards
The California Endowment engages young people living in California to serve on its President’s Youth Council, intended to center youth voices and help shape the foundation’s investments and culture. During three-year terms, council members provide community perspective and also get leadership, professional-development, and networking opportunities.
To include young people in its decision-making processes, the Global Fund for Children
works with an active Youth Leadership Council composed of seven youth leaders between
the ages of 18-29, representing different facets of the social sector around the world. The council’s chair was once a participant in a grantee partner’s programming, and now sits on both the foundation’s board and grantmaking committee. Council members are considered “vital sources” when the foundation is designing strategies, programs, or selecting new community-based grantee partners.
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.
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