Community-Led Funds and Community-Liaison Officers: Snapshots of Funder Listening

Follow Teletia Atkins into the Bootheel region of Southeast Missouri in a new short video from Fund for Shared Insight. Watch how Atkins, a community liaison at Missouri Foundation for Health, listens to and learns from the people who live there.

"Communities want [funders] to listen to them, instead of coming in and saying, 'We know what you need,’" Atkins says, as we see her engaging with local residents, nonprofit leaders, and health officials.

In a new post from the Omaha Community Foundation, two staff members, Anne Meysenburg and Dasia Horne, offer an honest assessment of the joys and challenges of the foundation’s participatory grantmaking efforts, which include administering five community-led funds run by residents directly connected to the populations the funds target.

The authors also offer their thoughts on what it takes to create a level playing field in decision making when power imbalances in philanthropy are a fact.

VIEWPOINT - Grantmaking as Bumper Bowling: A Community Foundation’s Journey towards Shifting and Sharing Power

VIDEO - At Missouri Foundation for Health, Community Liaisons Listen and Build Connections

Listen4Good Offers Funders Paths to Feedback Partnerships with Grantees

As the nonprofit feedback capacity program Listen4Good crosses the milestone of serving its 1,000th organization, founder and executive director Valerie Threlfall celebrates the achievement and offers a next step for philanthropy: co-learning around feedback data.

It's time, she writes in a new post, for funders and nonprofits to seize the opportunity to "sit together on the same side of the table and co-learn from a common source of insight, the community."

VIEWPOINT - A New Day for Listening: Funders Co-Learning From Nonprofits’ Community Feedback

VIRTUAL EVENT INVITATION - Join the celebration!