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.
Who are the communities you seek to serve and what is your relationship to them?
When you engage in any listening practice, it’s important to define who the communities are that you seek to serve, to listen to, and shift power to, and understand your relationship to them.
Q: How does your foundation define the communities it seeks to serve/benefit?
Q: Who has lived expertise on the issues you focus on?
Q: Does your work have geographic boundaries (e.g., neighborhoods, zip codes, regions, etc.) when defining communities?
Q: Are there demographic priorities (e.g., people of color in general or specific racial/ethnic groups, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, women/girl-identified, etc.) defining communities?
Q: Are there shared circumstances of focus (e.g., returning citizens, youth transitioning out of foster care, un/under-insured, undocumented) defining communities?
Q: In whatever ways you define community, who is on the margins needing to be brought to the center of your attention in order to fully and most effectively serve the community?
Get going with these tools and resources
Understanding who your community is begins with acknowledging the Native land on which it resides. This interactive website features a mapping project exploring the boundaries of Indigenous people and history through territory, language, and treaties.
Put people and communities at the center and help them make meaningful change within a framework that values the five dompains of wellbeing, social connectedness, stability, safety, mastery, and access to resources.
A starting point for centering community, shifting power, and healing systemic harms, this document states eight fundamental rights communities have when engaging with systems and philanthropies.
Strong and supported community-based leaders are an essential component to engaging in listening to shift power. This report provides a detailed exploration of the conditions necessary for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) leaders to thrive within their communities and organizations.
This tool can help you distinguish between Indigenous-led, Indigenous-informed, and Indigenous-benefiting charities as your foundation makes funding and partnership decisions.
Use this spectrum to assess your current community engagement and set goals for how your foundation’s efforts can advance toward greater community ownership.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
The Colorado Health Foundation’s annual survey of nearly 3,000 Coloradans helps shape strategy. In recent years, residents have identified the rising cost of living, the cost of housing, and homelessness as the most serious problems facing the state. In response to those results and other input from community, the foundation added a new priority area, Economic Opportunity. And it is relying on additional listening efforts, such as interviews and focus groups and its staff’s continued community engagement, to inform its work in that area.
Says Tracey Stewart, a senior program officer: The survey data, “point us in a certain direction and then we start knocking on the doors of the people we need to meet to understand, plan, and act.”
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.
