Tools & Resources to Shift Power to Communities
Browse Menu
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.
Convene community advisory boards
In addition to changing the composition of governing boards, foundations also can take steps to listen to shift power by creating advisory boards composed of individuals impacted by their philanthropy. Advisory boards should maximize opportunities to lift up the diversity of community voice, have a true share in decision making, and be shaped by, or operate through, participatory processes.
Remember that when working with community members in these new ways, it’s critical to build a culture that makes everyone feel welcome, supported, and able to contribute.
Get going with these tools and resources
The key steps, things to know, and things to avoid laid out for you here apply to creating a disability advisory group, and are also relevant to building any kind of inclusive panel engaged in participatory work.
This toolkit offers practical guidance, questions, and approaches for creating a community advisory board that can strengthen community empowerment, buy-in, and participation.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
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 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 Fund’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 council to vote on what organization to support.
In Kansas City, GreenLight Fund supports a Community Consultants program, an initiative that invites additional community members to work alongside the Selection Advisory Council in identifying and vetting potential grantee organizations. The consultants have a contract with GreenLight Fund for up to a year of paid work, which includes going on site visits and facilitating community meetings.
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.
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.
Explore this menu to spark the changes you want to see.
Mix and match to find the examples, resources, and reflections best suited to help you and your organization shift power to the people and communities at the heart of your work.
Have questions about the menu or ideas for resources or examples?
Please reach out to our communications manager, Debra Blum.
