Funder Listening Action Menu

Tools & Resources to Shift Power to Communities

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 team.

Listen through your role or function

Listen through various approaches

Reflect on listening and power

Ready to dive in?

This menu features a variety of ways funders are listening to shift power across the many dimensions of their work — and offers resources to start or strengthen your own foundation’s practices.

It might help to first:

Read our blog post that explores what it means for funders to listen in ways that shift power to communities.
Check out the Funder Listening Assessment to take stock of your organization’s values, practices, and alignment around listening, learning, and equity.

What Is Funder Listening to Shift Power?

October 22, 2024
Melinda Tuan
Fund for Shared Insight

Funder Listening Assessment

Take a look at how your foundation listens to, learns with, and shares power with the people and communities most impacted by your work.

Funder listening to shift power

Is not a one-time activity or exercise, but an ongoing process.

Listening well reflects a commitment to the five steps of a high-quality feedback loop, which includes closing the loop – circling back to those who shared their perspectives to let them know what you heard and how you are planning to respond.

Is grounded in relationships and partnership.

Research from our learning partner, ORS Impact, suggests that listening processes that are most effective at advancing equity and shifting power involve being in relationship and partnership throughout the process – from framing the initial conversations to making meaning from what is heard to figuring out how to respond. These relationships are built on open channels of communication, mutual accountability, and authentic partnership, such as through shared decision making.

Engages an explicit power analysis.

Funders have historically exercised outsized power, and that dynamic, if not taken into account and addressed, can result in funder listening that is extractive, transactional, or just reinforcing what funders want to hear. Funders should approach listening with a clear understanding of how power currently operates and with specific attention to people and communities most impacted, but not typically consulted, by philanthropy and nonprofits.

Advances equity.

This kind of listening offers an opportunity for funders to hear from — and work shoulder-to-shoulder with — diverse communities and people who are experts in their own lives and have myriad assets and capabilities. It engages multiple forms of listening, such as systematic feedback loops, participatory processes, and community-driven practices, to make lasting systemic change.

Done well, we believe listening — especially to those who have been historically marginalized by structural racism and other systemic inequities — can improve philanthropy and build a more just and equitable society.