Tools & Resources to Shift Power to Communities
Browse Menu
Looking at your role/function within your foundation.
What are listening practices that can shift power?
Assess how you are listening through a set of reflection questions.
Are you a donor or do you advise donors?
If you are a foundation donor — or work closely with donors — you have unique opportunities to shift your mindset from one of ownership over the organization’s wealth to one of stewarding resources into the hands and control of impacted communities. With this kind of reframing, defined by, and advanced through, listening to the people and communities your foundation seeks to serve, you’ll be creating a legacy of partnership that delivers resources where they are needed most.
Note: If you’re a fundraiser, take a look at what community-centric fundraising is all about.
Get going with these tools and resources
Join a network of funders and donor organizers committed to building relationships with social movement leaders to provide support for transformational change toward a more just and collective future.
Resource Generation offers resources and programming to young people with wealth or class privilege, or who are involved in family foundations to learn more about philanthropy around social, racial, economic, or environmental justice. Use this guidance to help you make sense of all the opportunities to give and move your money in the direction of social change efforts led by people most impacted by injustice.
This guide invites you to reflect on four principles — accountability, equity, learning, and relationships — considering the meaning of each, how they manifest in your foundation’s philanthropic purpose, and how they show up in governance, grantmaking, and operations.
Pro tip: National Center for Family Philanthropy’s website offers additional resources to help families realize the purpose and potential of philanthropy for meaningful impact.
Get inspired by what other funders are doing
After Eileen Farbman inherited a family foundation she describes as conservative, she, her husband, and their son set out to turn it into something different, something “outside of the harmful practices they had seen in philanthropy and giving at large.” They would go on to create the Kolibri Foundation, working alongside three leaders in movements at the intersections of gender, racial, and economic justice, who also became trustees.
With bylaws at the new entity requiring that family members always represent a minority on the board, two additional movement leaders joined the original three alongside the three Farbmans to comprise the governing board.But even before the Farbmans reached outside the family to work on the foundation, they looked inward, clarifying commitments to communicate openly; be mindful of their own intentions and emotions and those of others; and to be inspired, challenged, and grateful. The result, a two-page document hashed out over a weekend workshop with consultants, was a set of “Shared Agreements” that the family continues to revisit regularly.
Says Farbman: “We felt we could not minimize the importance of family dynamics before stepping into relationships across class and race.”
In addition to the family agreements, the full board created a separate set of “Shared Community Agreements,” which is read before every board meeting. One of the agreements, which is about honoring opinions “rooted in different vantage points,” tells board members to “not let fear of power dynamics prevent us from saying what we think must be said.”
Through a community-based research process that tapped the wisdom of local movement leaders and grantee partners, the Tzedek Social Justice Fund recognized that it needed board members with direct experience doing the kind of work that Tzedek funds. Founder and donor Amy Mandel stepped down from the board, and Tzedek is now governed by a board of community leaders with diverse backgrounds and lived experience.
