Listening and Participation Prime Funders to Honor and Build Community Ownership

There are a variety of ways funders and nonprofits are trying to shift the power dynamics between those who typically have held it (i.e., funders and organizations) to those who have unique and important expertise: those most affected by the problems the social sector is trying to solve. In this article, we share lessons from two evaluations that sought to understand how those who were being listened to experienced the listening process, exploring the degree to which people felt heard and their experiences of how, and in what ways, power shifted for them. One evaluation focused on the experiences of individuals who had given feedback to nonprofits serving them. While this evaluation focused on nonprofit organizations, we believe the lessons learned about how feedback and the act of listening itself influenced organizational change and advanced equity within organizations has relevance for funders, as well. In the second, we explicitly explored questions of power-shifting with participants in and grantees of a participatory grantmaking initiative. By looking across these two sets of evaluation findings, we elevate ways of thinking about power, as well as new considerations and implications for funders who seek to listen to the people most impacted by the problems they are working on.