Two long-standing family philanthropies, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund and the William Penn Foundation, each recently undertook strategic refreshes grounded in community engagement. What followed was more than cosmetic change. In a conversation with Melinda Tuan, Listen to Community’s Lead Ambassador, their leaders highlight what shifted, including funding priority areas and board practices. They also speak candidly about the opportunities for change when younger generations of family members take leadership roles and want their decisions to be more closely informed by the communities the foundation serves.
Below are excerpts from their conversation, which took place during a webinar hosted by the National Center for Family Philanthropy, a Listen to Community co-founder. Melinda’s questions and the responses from Haas Fund executive director Jamie Allison and William Penn’s executive director Shawn McCaney were edited for length and clarity.
Melinda: When we’re talking about listening to community, how do you define the community that you’re listening to?
Jamie Allison, Haas Fund:
We recently went through a strategic and operational makeover, which included making a commitment to centering community, and within that articulation it was important to define who our community is. At the fund, we think of our community as young people, artists, and nonprofit leaders in the areas in which we do our work, which we describe as social wellbeing and economic wellbeing. With that definition, we know to whom we will go back to over and over and over again for our listening.
Shawn McCaney, William Penn:
The way we define community has changed radically through our strategy revision and update. We adopted a new unifying mission to increase opportunities and access for more people. We pay particular attention to supporting people and communities in Philadelphia that have historically been shut out of opportunities and resources and have been most affected by economic inequity, discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation, and other forms of injustice.
it was important to define who our community is ... With that definition, we know to whom we will go back to over and over and over again for our listening.
Melinda: Both your foundations have recently done a strategic refresh with community input. How did you close the feedback loop?
Jamie Allison, Haas Fund:
We tried to be as clear as possible about what we were going to do with the feedback, including reporting back to the community through blogs, newsletters, emails, and webinars about what we were learning and how it was shaping our thinking. We wanted people to know that what comes out of these conversations will actually be a deciding factor in what we do next.
It’s also important to treat people’s participation as expertise. When we ask community members to participate in focus groups, interviews, or to review our work or proposals, we pay people for their time. That’s a small but important way of respecting the knowledge they bring.
Listening efforts should not be extractive. It’s just terrible to go to community, ask them to do a bunch of work for you, and then they never hear from you again.
Shawn McCaney, William Penn:
Our engagement process included conversations with different stakeholders, including community members, particularly folks we don’t normally talk to because they are not part of our networks or coming to us for grants. We asked what was important to them, what issues they were grappling with, and we used that to inform our planning and a rough draft of our strategy. Then we went back and had a second round of engagement where we shared those initial plans with the community to ground truth them or market test them, using third party facilitated focus groups to ensure that we were getting candid responses. When we made more changes based on that second round of input, I think people were like, “I guess they really do want to hear what we have to say.”
It’s through these repeated interactions that you build trust and people finally start telling you what they really think.
Melinda: What changed because of what you heard?
Shawn McCaney, William Penn:
One cross-cutting theme was people saying to us, “We don’t think the William Penn Foundation should be funding new things. We think your focus should be on making the programs and assets we have better.” So we decided not to pursue a whole group of potential grant-making objectives focused on investing in new things. Our program took on a stewardship sort of theme that’s about making what we already have better.
Beyond changing the focus of what we fund, another significant change was in how we fund. We transitioned from a foundation that had a heavy hand in shaping grantmaking requests to instead having an open and transparent RFP process where we essentially say, “What do you think are the best approaches to solving these challenges?”
Jamie Allison, Haas Fund:
An experience we had during the early months of COVID showed us how powerful it can be to listen. At that time, we held “learning labs” with young people and adults to ask how we could best show up for community. Instead of the needs and issues we expected to hear — food, housing, or education — young people spoke most urgently about the toll of isolation and the need for community-based mental health supports.
When trustees saw how clearly this input pointed to where funding could make a difference, they were quickly addicted to community listening.
We transitioned from a foundation that had a heavy hand in shaping grantmaking requests to instead having an open and transparent RFP process where we essentially say, ‘What do you think are the best approaches to solving these challenges?’
Melinda: How has listening changed your institutions internally?
Shawn McCaney, William Penn:
We shifted from being a place where our program staff helped heavily shape requests for funding, to instead shifting toward a position of more community-informed grantmaking, asking the grantees how they think they can more effectively pursue work that helps advance grantmaking objectives. This had a big impact on the staff, and it was a difficult transition. Some felt their expertise was being devalued and some staff left. But in the end, we know it was the right transition to make because we have opened ourselves up to a whole new set of insights and information that we didn’t have access to before.
At the board level, we mostly don’t approve individual grants anymore. About 70% of our grantmaking is approved as part of clusters of grants that are generated through RFP’s and that are responding to important issues in our city.
Jamie Allison, Haas Fund:
We are better grant makers. We have strengthened relationships in the community. We are much better informed about dynamics in the community and the organizations that are doing work to invest in community wellbeing every day.
We went from having quarterly board meetings just because that’s how it’s been to timing the meetings to align with the listening opportunities we’ve had so the board will have information directly from community. Now, the meetings are less about grant-by-grant transactions and more about learning.
Melinda: What is the composition of your board and how does that relate to how your foundation is shifting power to community?
Jamie Allison, Haas Fund:
We have six board members, all members of the Haas family. We don’t have community board members at this time, but I imagine it’s a conversation we will have. When I came to the fund eight years ago, it coincided with a generational shift on the board from third generation family members to fourth, and there was a sense that we are creating the next iteration of the fund together. That has driven much of our evolution around listening and community engagement, and that is still evolving.
Shawn McCaney, William Penn:
We are still a family foundation, too — more than half the board is family — and so we have not moved the highest decision-making authority to community. But our strategic planning process coincided with a leadership change from third to fourth generation family on the board, and they brought a new set of values, and for the first time, the foundation developed values to guide grantmaking. Those included lifting community voice, and we’ve moved to a system where the community is playing a bigger and bigger role in what we do and what we invest in.
