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.
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?
In order to listen to communities in authentic and non-extractive ways, it’s critical that your foundation engage in its own reflection on the institutional sources of power and how it uses that power.
Q: What are the sources of your institution’s financial wealth?
Q: What are the ideas about what power is and how it operates? For example, is power thought of as primarily about control over others, or something that is generated in relationship with others? Is it considered inherently good or bad, neither or both? Dig deep, below the official ways your foundation might document its definition of power, to the underlying mental models that can be revealed through shared assumptions.
Q: What are the formal and informal ways your foundation uses its institutional power?
Q: How does your foundation collaborate or coordinate with other funders on your efforts to listen to shift power?
Q: How is your foundation’s power analysis evolving over time?
Get going with these tools and resources
Use this self-assessment toolkit to determine how well your foundation is building, sharing, and wielding power and to identify ways to transform your programs and operations for lasting, equitable impact.
This tool guides conversations around what is or isn’t being done to center community in your organization.
Consider this set of principles, processes, and practices that are designed to transition whole communities, building thriving economies that provide dignified, productive, and ecologically sustainable livelihoods; democratic governance, and ecological resilience.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
In 2016, board members at Weissberg Foundation participated in “Putting Racism on the Table,” a learning series led by the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers under the leadership of Tamara Copeland, who now serves as one of the foundation’s trustees. They also hired the foundation’s first professional executive director. Since then, the board named racial equity as its North Star, and completed the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy’s Power Moves curriculum.
Through the work, Weissberg has built clarity around the need to shift power and to prioritize organizations led by and accountable to those most negatively impacted by racism. And it has adopted a four-part strategic plan focused on innovative grantmaking, investing for impact, internalizing racial equity, and influencing philanthropy.
The foundation has also explored its wealth origin story and identified harm that may have been caused in the creation of the foundation’s wealth. It has acknowledged that the commercial real estate investments that provided the basis for the foundation’s corpus, and helped transform Northern Virginia into the region it is today, may have contributed to the displacement of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and low-income communities. And while the effort to explore its wealth origin story is ongoing, the foundation’s support of economic power building is a nod to the ties between land, land ownership, and wealth building from pre-history through today, and an acknowledgement of Virginia’s history of Native land theft and public and private destruction of Black wealth related to home and land ownership. The foundation works with consultants to continue developing skills for talking about power and racial inequity, and for interacting productively across lines of difference.
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.
