Evaluating Efforts to Shift Power Through Listening: Defining Power and Listening to All Sides

It is commonplace today for philanthropies to require grantee partners to have a community engagement strategy to ensure that the institution reflects the community that it serves. It is also incumbent on foundations to embrace the same intent. Alongside participatory practices, listening is an opportunity to level the power dynamics inherent to philanthropic practice. The BUILD Health Challenge® (BUILD) is an innovative funder collaborative designed to support local cross-sector action to address the root cause of health inequities. Established in 2015, BUILD supports participants from across the U.S. to engage in partnerships including residents, community-based organizations, health departments, and health systems. Listening practice begins with the understanding that the work of building a better future should be guided by those who experience the impacts of our decisions and therefore know best what those decisions should be. Over time, BUILD progressed from gathering feedback to fostering deep trust with awardees and fully integrating awardee voice and decision-making into its operational framework and culture. While BUILD committed to these actions from the outset, implementation was a decade-long process requiring diligent iteration and openness to change and growth. In 2021, BUILD worked with Success Measures to carry out a Listening Tour, co-designed with previous grantees, that elicited clear steps for how grantees could help shape subsequent rounds of awards and the structure of BUILD. Subsequent listening has fundamentally shifted BUILD, including its strategic plan, a more overt focus on racial justice, increasing accountability, and pathways for current and previous grantees to participate in decision-making. This article will highlight the listening process that BUILD invested in over several years and what it enabled. It will also highlight what made the listening possible, how BUILD and its community partners took action based on the feedback, and how long-term practice built trust and enabled transformative change.