Listen to inform your work more broadly
Beyond listening specifically to support grant decisions, strategy development, or measurement, embracing listening as a value and a standard will inform all aspects of your work, building trust and true partnerships. Here are some ways funders can listen directly to community:
The Community Foundation of the Central Blue Ridge (CFCBR) and Missouri Foundation for Health (MFH) each employ full-time community liaisons. Unlike program officers who deal with grants and grantees, these staff members have a mission to hear directly from and build relationships with the people their foundations seek to serve, reporting back in both formal and informal ways to inform and shape decision making at the organization.
The CFCBR’s director of community engagement, who has lunch every week at a local homeless shelter, says his strategy is to make himself a “part of the fabric of the community.” At MFH, the director of community relationships says for herself and the other field-based staff, the “whole job is just talking and listening to everyone” they can.
Building upon an initial wave of research that researchers, partners and community advisors felt wasn’t capturing the full story about how Black and African American respondents were participating in culture and creativity, the Barr Foundation and Wallace Foundation supported a qualitative phase of research (“Black Perspectives on Creativity, Trustworthiness, Welcome and Well-Being: A Qualitative Study”). The advisors, researchers, and funders saw this qualitative research as an opportunity to expand on what was learned in the first wave of research, as well as to determine how they might improve the subsequent “Wave 2” research to better reflect Black and African American experiences.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation funds large-scale polls that, like community research, are intended to enhance the foundation’s and the broader field’s understanding of the people, communities, and environments where they operate. Hewlett sponsors Colorado College’s Conservation in the West poll, an annual survey of voters across eight western states about their opinions on conservation issues. It also funds the Ghana Center for Democratic Development’s work on the Afro-Barometer, a continent-wide survey of public attitudes on democracy and governance.
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.
For three years, the Satterberg Foundation and its partners convened an annual Seattle Equity Summit, bringing together more than 400 BIPOC community members, along with white allies and partners, to listen to each other, share social justice and political strategies, and network. The summits included representatives from business, government, and nonprofits, along with community members. The organizers recorded actionable items and reported progress back to the group.
Inspired by Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer, social-justice activist, and author who popularized the phrase “get proximate,” staff members at the Silicon Valley Venture Fund (SV2) have participated in community-led walking tours and discussions, shared a meal and conversation with residents in a transitional facility, and participated in a virtual reality experience meant to dramatize the challenges that foster children face.
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.
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.
