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.
Are you involved with measurement, learning, and evaluation?
There are many ways of knowing. Participants’ first-hand experiences and perspectives produce knowledge that is just as valid as data from other monitoring and evaluation activities, and should be a critical component of your approach to measurement, learning, and evaluation.
Get going with these tools and resources
This guide offers practical tools, tips, and examples for integrating participatory learning into practice, such as integrating grantee and community input, and addressing limitations in traditional feedback loops.
This framework invites evaluation practitioners to recognize culture, context, and power in their evaluative work and to make explicit the ways they are tending to each. It can be used to design a measurement, learning, and evaluation strategy that invites alignment of purpose, process, and policies to shift power to community.
See publications and projects here to help orient your work in any type of community around the idea of Indigenous data sovereignty, the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data.
This set of tools will help you understand how and why to “decolonize data,” using Native scientific methodologies to collect and present data with the necessary context to tell the complete stories. Decolonizing your data is essential to truly understanding and hearing the people and communities at the heart of your work.
Use these tools, including one that matches research questions to methodologies, to bring more equity and fairness to how you look at and use data to tell the stories of the people and communities you seek to transform.
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 doing
The Katz Amsterdam Foundation collaborated with global social impact firm FSG and representatives from seven mountain resort communities to create a shared measurement framework with joint indicators for mental health and well-being. Previously, grantees had shared that key data on mental health and community well-being were unavailable for many mountain resort communities, making it difficult to measure their impact or develop programs that truly addressed community needs. Informed by community surveys conducted every other year, the data is now available through a public-facing dashboard in English and Spanish. Grantees have leveraged this data for strategic decision-making, targeting programs for specific sub-populations, securing additional funding, and collaborating effectively across regions.
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.
