Funder Listening Action Menu

Tools & Resources to Shift Power to Communities

Browse Menu

Listen through your role or function

Looking at your role/function within your foundation.

Listen through various approaches

What are listening practices that can shift power?

Reflect on listening and power

Assess how you are listening through a set of reflection questions.

Start Listening to Shift Power to Communities

Reflect on listening and power

We recommend you and your foundation consider the following reflection questions to help assess your readiness to listen in ways that can shift power to impacted communities.

Reflect on listening and power

Who are the communities you seek to serve and what is your relationship with them?

How do you think about your own power? What power do you hold and how do you wield it?

What power does your foundation hold and how does it wield it? What spoken or unspoken ideas about power are at play at your foundation?

Pro Tip

Reading these discussions on power might help deepen and contextualize your reflections:

The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics ↗

Cyndi Suarez

Limitless Possibilities: A Guide to Power Shifting Approaches in Philanthropy ↗

(formally) Center for Culturally Responsive Engagement, at MPHI

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.

How to use the menu

How we choose the items

How to use the menu

Funders are moving toward listening and participatory practices at different rates and from different starting points and perspectives. We also know that shifting power is not easy work and requires a strong internal commitment and continuous learning. It’s best to be clear on your organization’s motivations, capabilities, and goals. As you engage with this menu, consider your funding practices, operations, policies, and values — and then identify where change will best serve your foundation and the people and communities you seek to serve.

We recommend examining the menu’s resources and examples with a willingness to turn kernels of ideas into something right for you. No matter where you start or the path you travel through this menu, we suggest spending time on the reflection questions, perhaps engaging colleagues to help you and your organization better understand and prepare for what it means to listen to shift power.

Our Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit, included as a resource in the menu, has a Funder Readiness Assessment that can be adapted to different listening practices and help prepare you to make changes in your priorities and practices.

How we choose the items

We offer a range of examples and resources because there are no one-size-fits-all solutions; and we share them in a menu format so you can choose what’s interesting or relevant to you and your foundation. We don’t rank the practices or the organizations employing them or intend to signal that any featured funder has met its listening goals 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.

Similarly, we do not rank the resources, though we did select them based on a set of criteria, including:

We and/or our partners have personally used the resource and find it is high-quality, promotes impact, and aligns with our power analysis
The resource is widely and publicly available (not just to paid members) and, ideally, accessible to people with disabilities
The resource is relevant to, and includes applicable lessons for, a variety of types of funders
The resource is as evergreen as possible

New resources are always coming online. We hope that the ones we’ve included are helpful while also sparking your curiosity and helping you forge an ongoing relationship with the creators and other aligned efforts.

We are always looking to add more funder listening examples and more resources. Please reach out to our communications manager, Debra Blum, or take a few minutes to share your stories and ideas on our Lift Up Listening online form.