Tools & Resources to Shift Power to Communities
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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.
Survey, convene, or meet with your community
Working with nonprofits through client-feedback programs, like Listen4Good, or through trust-based philanthropy approaches provide funders opportunities for indirect listening and learning. In direct listening, foundation staff or board members are the primary listeners or recipients of the insights, through activities such as hosting listening sessions, convening focus groups, and conducting surveys. Funders might also commission a third party, such as research firms or consultants, to gather input for them.
The key is that your listening activities are not one offs; that they are systematic, ongoing, and part of authentic partnerships and communications.
- Pro Tip
Make sure to take participant accessibility into account in all your listening activities, such as incorporating disability inclusion practices when convening meetings and oversampling underrepresented groups when conducting surveys. Current Global created a website to help you ensure that all your communications are accessible to people with disabilities.
Get going with these tools and resources
Learn how to host listening sessions that encourage meaningful community engagement and empower those most affected — yet often least consulted — to influence your foundation’s work.
Find practical resources on how to make your virtual and in-person meetings and events more inclusive, such as an accessibility checklist and much more.
This guide will help you and your foundation colleagues reimagine power dynamics and level the playing field on which you design research, generate knowledge, and make decisions. It provides an equity-based approach to research that offers a path to restoring communities as authors and owners.
Get inspired by what other funders are working on
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.
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.
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.
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.
