Listen through participatory practices

Listening is a foundational component of participatory philanthropy, which encompasses a range of practices intended to involve the people and communities most affected by your decisions in decision-making processes. Along with the examples below, resources — including from GrantCraft, the National Center for Family Philanthropy, and our Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit — can help you on your participatory journey.

New & Noteworthy

As with other GreenLight Funds across the country, GreenLight Boston 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.

When ACT for Alexandria set out to establish a fund with a participatory-grantmaking approach, its first focus group with community leaders provided feedback that signaled the foundation did not yet have the track record or trust necessary for such an effort. In response, ACT slowed the fund’s timeline, prioritizing relationship building in its day-to-day work, creating more space for community voice, partnering more deeply with community-based organizations, and executing a community-centered strategic planning process for the whole foundation.

That process led ACT back to its plans for a participatory-grantmaking fund when members of the strategy planning team, composed primarily of Alexandrians with lived experience at the intersection of race, immigration, and poverty, agreed to work on the fund’s inaugural community advisory board.

The Indigenous Women’s Flow Fund (IWFF) convenes five Indigenous women — described as artists, seed savers, poets, organizers, mothers, daughters, and grandmothers — to shape the themes of grantmaking programs, identify groups to support, and make final decisions on grants. An IWFF report says, “By making space for Indigenous women to create their own practices, rituals, and relationships to giving, IWFF becomes an example of what is possible when communities are given the autonomy to design processes that work best from within their own cultures and wisdom.”

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.

With chapters in 36 countries, YouthBank International promotes young people as decision makers. Each of its locally based programs is entirely led by youth peers who make grants using a collaborative process. They conduct community needs assessments and engage in a consensus-driven model facilitated by an adult leader – often from a donor foundation or local NGO.

Brooklyn Org 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.”

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.

Get inspired by this collection of ideas to spark the changes you want to see.

Real-life examples highlight practices and policies that value lived expertise, improve grantmaking, and advance equity.

About this collection

We offer a range of examples 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.

We encourage you to examine the menu with a willingness to turn kernels of ideas into something right for you. Remember to assess your organization’s understanding of the values, commitment level, and resources needed to implement high-quality listening and feedback practices. For more information on preparing to incorporate new practices or programs, check out our Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit’s Funder Readiness Assessment.