Funder Listening Action Menu

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. 

At Headwaters Foundation for Justice, two program funds were built from the ground up by the communities they serve.

The Fund of the Sacred Circle (FSC) emerged from a movement of Native-led philanthropy that sought to push back against what they saw as divestment from Native-led organizations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. They built a Native-led, culturally responsive fund supporting Native-led work with grants decisions made by the fund’s Native Community Grantmaking Circle.

“By having all Native staff and volunteers work on this, it began to change the narrative,” said Joy Persall, a member of FSC’s first grantmaking committee and a former foundation staff member. “People closest to the ground should be making the decisions, that’s self-determination. I felt like philanthropy needed to hear the story from our breath.”

Headwaters’ Black Movement Ecosystem, established by Black organizers to create a network of change makers throughout Minnesota, launched the Justice & Liberation Fund to invest in Black-led organizations working on the frontlines of justice. Funding decisions are made by a community-led grantmaking panel that, like FSC’s grantmaking circles, also reviews grant proposals and leads site visits.

Headwaters supports both funds’ grantmaking panels by providing coaching and training, especially to volunteers without experience in philanthropy, and assistance with policy-setting around issues such as potential conflicts of interest among committee members. The foundation is helping the Justice & Liberation Fund recruit committee members under the age of 25 and over the age of 70 to ensure the group is representative of the multi-generational community it serves. At FSC, Headwaters is working with Native leaders to create an evaluation process that better aligns with Native priorities. For example, in many Indigenous communities, cultural prosperity is more valued than economic prosperity, so they are moving to base evaluations on long-term outcome that are different than what traditional philanthropy typically measures.

After Eileen Farbman inherited a family foundation she describes as conservative, she, her husband, and their son set out to turn it into something different, something “outside of the harmful practices they had seen in philanthropy and giving at large.” They would go on to create the Kolibri Foundation, working alongside three leaders in movements at the intersections of gender, racial, and economic justice, who also became trustees.

With bylaws at the new entity requiring that family members always represent a minority on the board, two additional movement leaders joined the original three alongside the three Farbmans to comprise the governing board.But even before the Farbmans reached outside the family to work on the foundation, they looked inward, clarifying commitments to communicate openly; be mindful of their own intentions and emotions and those of others; and to be inspired, challenged, and grateful. The result, a two-page document hashed out over a weekend workshop with consultants, was a set of “Shared Agreements” that the family continues to revisit regularly.

Says Farbman: “We felt we could not minimize the importance of family dynamics before stepping into relationships across class and race.”

In addition to the family agreements, the full board created a separate set of “Shared Community Agreements,” which is read before every board meeting. One of the agreements, which is about honoring opinions “rooted in different vantage points,” tells board members to “not let fear of power dynamics prevent us from saying what we think must be said.”

At the Better Way Foundation, a significant shift in governance has accompanied its evolving mission. Originally established by the Rauenhorst family in 1994 to support child well-being, the foundation, still guided by Catholic social values, has focused in on culturally rooted early childhood learning and development across Indian Country. Its governing board has flipped in recent years from majority family members to a deeper blend of family and community representation — currently three family members and seven community-based trustees, three of whom are Indigenous.

Executive director Nicholas Banovetz says board members are recruited to create all kinds of diversity, including in age, lived experience, and skill sets. One trustee, Zada Ballew, is a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi People, a PhD candidate researching and teaching Indigenous history, and chair of the University of Notre Dame’s Native American Alumni. Banovetz says her ability to illuminate and navigate the complex intersections between Indigenous communities and the Catholic faith has informed Better Way’s growing relationships with Native-led organizations and work in the area of truth-telling and healing.

“There’s always so much talk about transforming philanthropy,” Banovetz says. A governing board that honors both family legacy and community voice helps Better Way “lean into that desire for change.”