Listening to community members and tapping into community expertise are key factors when trying to understand why social issues are happening, and what potential solutions may be best to address these challenges. This is especially true for philanthropy, a sector committed to traditionally funding social change through more “top down” strategies, rather than seeking and empowering community-driven solutions from the beginning.
Over the last 10 years, the funder collaborative Fund for Shared Insight has been working to support philanthropy to better engage and uplift community voice by promoting resources and building capacity around community listening, centering community voice and expertise, and learning how to shift from “power over” to “power with” their community members and partnering organizations.
In this new podcast discussion, we talk with Melinda Tuan, Shared Insight’s managing director. Melinda shares key takeaways from the last decade, including what it takes to support and encourage change in how foundations work with communities. From participatory practices to community advisory boards, we explore strategies that have helped foundations better connect to their constituents and reach their funding goals.
Ways to listen: You can listen below or on your preferred podcast streaming service, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Please find a transcript of this talk further down this page.
Resources and Footnotes
- Fund for Shared Insight
- Time for a Three-Legged Measurement Stool
- Funder Listening Action Menu
- The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
- The What, Why, and How of Advancing Funder Openness
- Advancing Funders’ Openness Practices Report
- Building Capacity to Support Community Listening
More on Collective Impact
- Infographic: What is Collective Impact?
- Resource List: Getting Started in Collective Impact
Music
The Intro music, entitled “Running,” was composed by Rafael Krux, and can be found here and is licensed under CC: By 4.0.
The outro music, entitled “Deliberate Thought,” was composed by Kevin Macleod. Licensed under CC: By.
Listen to Past Episodes: You can listen and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Simplecast, iHeartRadio, Amazon, and other podcast apps.
Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the Collective Impact Forum podcast, here to share resources to support social change makers working on cross-sector collaboration.
The Collective Impact Forum is a nonprofit field-building initiative that is co-hosted in partnership by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG and the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions.
In this episode, we explore why it’s so important for foundations to include community experience and expertise as part of their grantmaking process. Traditionally, philanthropy has often worked from the “top-down,” making critical funding decisions without directly engaging the communities they aim to help. Over the last decade, a funder collaborative called the Fund for Shared Insight has worked to shift this paradigm, encouraging foundations to embrace community-driven solutions by empowering voices at the grassroots level.
To learn more, we talk with Melinda Tuan, who serves as managing director at the Fund for Shared Insight, Melinda reflects on the organization’s efforts to change the way foundations engage with communities and shares valuable insights from their past decade of work. Tune in to learn how these strategies are helping foundations better connect with those they serve and create lasting, impactful change.
Serving as interviewer today is the Collective Impact Forum’s Executive Director Jennifer Splansky Juster. Let’s tune in.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s podcast. I’m Jennifer Juster, executive director of the Collective Impact Forum. Here at the Forum much of the work that we support focuses on how practitioners often folks working in the nonprofit or public sector are facilitating and creating conditions for multisector collaboratives to work with community to create a better future.
One key partner in many of these collaboratives is philanthropy, and ideally, philanthropy that is working with the community not only bringing dollars in but truly as an engaged and meaningful partner in the work. However, power dynamics that often exist between philanthropy and nonprofits can at times make this type of engagement challenging. The good news is there is an increasing awareness of these challenges of this power dynamic in the field and several groups working to support philanthropy to change how it partners with community.
One of the groups supporting this type of practice change is the Fund for Shared Insight. I’m delighted today to be joined by Melinda Tuan, managing director at the Fund for Shared Insight. Melinda will tell us more about their work and how they’re engaging to help funders to shift power to community. So without further ado, welcome, Melinda.
Melinda Tuan: Thank you, Jen. It’s so good to be with you today.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Well, we are happy to have you. I’d love to start just by asking you to introduce yourself a bit more fully and tell us a little bit about what brought you to your current work.
Melinda Tuan: Sure. Melinda Tuan, managing director, Fund for Shared Insight. We’ve been doing this work for about 10 years, but I’ve been an independent consultant in philanthropy for about 21 years and before that I had the privilege of cofounding a really terrific social venture fund called the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund, or REDF, and all of the work that I do there’s a theme around improving the effectiveness of the sector, whether it’s nonprofits or philanthropy or individual philanthropists and their work.
That’s the real emphasis of my work. I had done projects with probably half of the funders that had come together to create this funder collaborative, which didn’t have a name in 2014 when I joined. So when they were looking for someone to backbone this funder collaborative whose focus was on improving philanthropy, lore has it that several of them said, “Oh, I’ve worked with Melinda.” “Oh, I have too. Let’s talk to Melinda.” They came to me and asked if I would be willing to backbone this funder collaborative and I said yes. And I’ve been delighted to be a part of this very joyful experience working with Fund for Shared Insight.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Here we are a decade later, indeed. Tell us a little bit more about the work of the Fund for Shared Insight and the fund itself.
Melinda Tuan: Fund for Shared Insight is a funder collaborative. There are many different forms for funder collaboratives. Our form is that of a pooled fund. We’re a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. We were founded in 2014 to improve philanthropy, partly because the Hewlett Foundation at the time had just ended a large strategy and had extra funds to improve philanthropy. It was out of the Effective Philanthropy Group at Hewlett. Fay Twersky, Lindsay Louie at the time went around to different funders and said how should Hewlett use these funds to improve philanthropy? And again, lore has it that Darren Walker was part of those conversations. He had not yet been named the head of Ford, and he said, “Fay, let’s do something together.” And it was really Ford and Hewlett and then a handful of other funders that all decided to put their funds together to address improving philanthropy and they looked at big data. They looked at influencing government. They did landscape scans around a variety of these different strategies, and one of the landscapes scans they did was around listening to people in communities most impacted but often least consulted by philanthropy.
At the time we used the phrase beneficiary voice. We don’t really use beneficiary so much anymore. Its language has changed over the last 10 years. But that was what the funders decided to invest in, is how can we improve philanthropy, in particular institutional philanthropy, by helping funders listen to and shift power to the communities most harmed by systemic racism, by intersectional inequities, and make sure that people in communities are better off in ways they define for themselves. So really in partnership with community to make sure that people are better off in ways they define for themselves.
So that’s really where our work began, and over the last 10 years there’s been this arc across our work. In the beginning, a lot of funders were asking why is it important to listen to community, and other funders were saying what is the social return on investment or cost benefit of listening to communities. Those were somewhat annoying conversations that we had to have and fortunately, those are no longer the conversations we’re having. Now funders are asking more around how. How do we listen to community in partnership? What does it look like to actually shift power to communities? So our work has really crossed, over the past 10 years, moving, hopefully contributing to the sector, embracing the idea that it’s important to listen to community. It’s the smart thing to do to listen to community, and now, really our emphasis is on how best to do that.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: For the funders that are part of the Fund for Shared Insight tell me a little bit more about what the work with them looks like in addition to creating a pooled fund?
Melinda Tuan: It’s interesting because we’ve talked with our funders, which have changed over time. There have been a few that have been very consistent over the past 10 years. We have some funders that are core funders, which means they are part of our advisory board. We have some sidecar funders that come in and contribute general operating support. But the ones that are really core to the work we talk about them being the agents of change that we’re seeking in philanthropy, and they’re also the targets of that change.
So really looking at ourselves and how are we practicing as a funder collaborative but also how those individual foundations are embracing these principles around listening to shift power to community. It’s challenging and it’s been a challenging road for us. I would say in the beginning we didn’t have an equity focus to our work. There was no lens around equity. I’m embarrassed to admit that and it’s part of our story, that we have been on this equity journey. In some ways you can say how can you talk about listening to community without understanding that fundamentally there’s equity at play there.
But, as a leader of this initiative, I will admit that that was not something that was in my mind in 2014 when I took on this position. And really through our equity partner, Gita Gulati-Partee who came on board with us through a number of different learning opportunities we facilitated for our core and sidecar funders. We went to Montgomery, Alabama, and spent some time with the Equal Justice Initiative. We’ve been to the Gila River community in Arizona to learn more about the Native American boarding schools. All of our board meetings which happen three times a year have a learning component built into them so that we can constantly be learning more about the experiences of communities that have been marginalized and how we can better listen to them and again, shift power to those communities.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Thank you for that arc and that overview and the transparency around the evolution of the work at the Fund for Shared Insight. I think that’s in some ways a similar arc that we have had at the Collective Impact Forum. We’ve been really putting equity at the center since about 2015, but in the first few years it was not core to the work, so we can really relate to that evolution and own where we started and where we are today. I appreciate you naming that.
Melinda Tuan: I think our timing is probably pretty similar too. Maybe you also found that when 2020 hit with the pandemic and the racial reckoning, I was so grateful that our colleagues at Kellogg, our colleagues at Ford who’ve been part of our initial core funder group had been pushing us sometimes with tears about why it was so important to focus on equity in our work really from 2014 on. So really when 2020 hit we were not behind the eight ball in terms of, oh, we need to start thinking about how we’re listening to community or how we’re centering equity in our work. The work is clearly not done. We’ve never arrived at a point. I’m constantly learning about ways to be more equity centered, challenged by our partners in this work. It really has been and continues to be a learning journey for us.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Very much likewise, Melinda, very much. But I do want to pick up on one core piece which is a core piece of doing work with equity at the center, which is shifting power. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean when you say that funders are listening and engaging and shifting power to community?
Melinda Tuan: I would love to tell you about this. I think it’s first helpful to define what we mean by power. I think there are many different meanings to the word power. But I think most western minds immediately go the definition that is most associated with I have power over you. I have the resources. I have the capital. I have the networks. That’s very much of a power over definition. And you can look up the actual definition in like the dictionary if one actually uses a dictionary anymore. But the way we think about power is the way that Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, and I’ll quote him. He said, “Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes.” Such a great statement. And we think of MLK’s quote as power with, which is different than power over because we as funders can only achieve our purposes, and especially our purposes oriented towards justice and liberation, by working in partnership with others.
It’s clear. Funders cannot do what they want to do without the nonprofits that they fund, without the communities that are being impacted by their funds, and the nonprofits’ services. So it really needs to be in partnership. So when we talk about our mission around funders, listening to shift power, we’re really not talking about shifting things from, OK, now the community has power over the funders. Again, it’s not a power over. It’s power with.
Some people have asked us why do you talk about shifting power? Why not sharing power? Some people are more comfortable with the idea of like, OK, we’ll share our power. But we say shifting power, which is not the opposite of sharing power, but it can include sharing powers. I like shifting because it goes toward community self-determination, community ownership, and community agency. That’s quite different than just I’ll share power with you and I’ll still have the ability to own and to have agency, but it’s really shifting that over to the community.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I’m definitely going to want to hear more about the how and some examples. But you referenced before that there were, in your early days, maybe some funders, some folks out in the field that were asking why. Why is it important to shift power to communities? I think most folks listening to this podcast as you’d imagine, that is a question that is not even coming to mind because it is so obviously the practice that they’re either practicing or seeking to embody. But sometimes there might be a need for folks in their communities to convince their colleagues, to convince their boards, to convince others why shifting power is important. So how do you answer that question, Melinda?
Melinda Tuan: Why is shifting power to community important? It’s important because the communities that we are seeking to serve, those at the heart of our work, they often know better than we do what their actual needs are, what is going to help improve their lives in ways they design for themselves. Foundations—it’s changing over time but foundations typically are composed of a lot of people who come from within a more western mindset, education, a lot of pedigrees. You can look at some of the bigger foundations and like where they went to school. It sort of mirrors a lot of the consulting firms. Investments banks in terms of their staff background and people in funder foundations often don’t have the lived experience and expertise of the communities with the issues and areas that we’re seeking to impact so we need to listen to community. We need to honor their voices and their preferences and their expertise about solutions to the problems that funders say that we want to address.
Again, we’re not talking about power over, like flipping it. We’re still valuing what funders can bring to the table. We’re valuing academic expertise. We value evaluations. There are many different resources that we can bring to bear to address the issues that we care most about but we really need to make sure that community is a driver of that process, that they have the power to be able to drive where the funds are going, how the decisions are made, and that’s really when we talk about listening to shift power why it’s important to communities there.
There was an article that Fay Twersky who was one of the founding cochairs of Fund for Shared Insight wrote when she was at Hewlett Foundation in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and SSRI recently came out with their top 10 articles over the last decade I think, and the article she wrote about, Time for a Three-Legged Stool Of Measurement, was one of the top articles which is so great because what she talked about is historically funders, nonprofits, have looked at monitoring and evaluation as the sources of how to measure whether something is working or not, and what’s been missing is feedback, listening to the community. She talked about a three-legged stool obviously which is monitoring and evaluation. You have two legs, very hard to stand, sit on a stool that has only two legs, not stable at all. But the third leg, listening to community, feedback from community, allows you then to take all of those disparate pieces of information and make good decisions in partnership with community about what the best solution are for the community.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Yes, I remember that piece and it’s a great one so we’ll try to include a link to that in the show notes for those who are interested in hearing more. But tell us more now a little bit about the how, Melinda. So how can funders listen in nonextractive ways to community to shift power?
Melinda Tuan: We are hearing more and more from funders asking this very question so how, how do we do this? We are continuing to work on different ways to address this because we recognize that funders come to this work from different perspectives. We are working on revising one tool resource that we are developing and it’s currently on our website called the Funder Listening Action Menu, and it lays out different ways that funders can listen to shift power. We think about these different entry points so a funder may be coming to this work from their particular role or functional area like I’m in grantmaking or strategy development or I’m in the measurement evaluation learning group or I’m a board member or I’m the donor that has the financial wealth so how do you listen to shift power from those different positional places. We have resources for each of those different categories and the examples of funders who are doing exactly that from their position as a board member or evaluation person or strategy person. Another entry point that we see funders coming in through is by the different types of listening practices which is probably what people think first. It’s like how do I listen? Do I do a focus group? Do I do site visits? How do I do this?
We’re working right now in developing a guide to different listening practices but the different categories that we have in our Funder Listening Action Menu include participatory practices as one approach so engaging people from the community in each aspect of how a funder is designing their strategy, implementing their strategy, designing their evaluation, doing the grantmaking. People sometimes glom on just to the participatory grantmaking aspect but there’s so many other ways that funders can and should engage people with lived experience in those different pieces of how they do their overall grantmaking. There are also different ways that funders can listen to shift power by who they’re hiring at the foundation. Do foundations reflect the staff? Do they reflect the community that they are seeking to serve? We have some examples of funders that have hired people from the community to be community liaison officers whose job is just to be in the community and create those connections. There are examples of community foundations whose CEOs are the heads of the foundation and come from the community, grew up in the community so they know the community well. There are other examples of foundations creating community advisory boards that are composed of people from the community who can advise but even better would be if the foundation actually had their board composed of primarily people from the community. That would be the ultimate way of shifting power to community.
There’s a funder called the Tzedek Social Justice Fund where the donor realized that the board did not have any of the lived experience in the areas that they were funding in and over time she stepped down and the board is now composed of people from the community with a very diverse set of backgrounds and lived experience in the issue areas that the fund funds in.
Another example of how funders can listen in nonextractive ways, and this is our signature project that we created at Fund for Shared Insight and then spun off independently as not every funder is equipped to listen directly to community. I mean I think it can become very extractive over time, every funder go into community and just have listening sessions without being informed by their own EDI journey, without having the capacity to do that well. When we’re talking about listening, we are talking about listening in ongoing systematic ways and not like these one-off surveys or one-off listening tours but really listening in an ongoing way, and one way to do that is through partnering with your nonprofits.
We created this capacity-building program called Listen4Good. You can find it at listen4good.org, and Listen4Good has worked with more than 1,000 nonprofits, sponsored by funders to listen to more than 230,000 people across the country. It is an ongoing systematic feedback loop that they work with nonprofits to build their capacity to listen, to respond, to close the loop with the people about what they heard from them and what they’re doing to address those needs, and that’s another way funders in partnership with nonprofits can be listening to community and shifting power to them because the people that are listened to through Listen4Good express what they need, funders can shift their behavior, their funding to address those things.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I appreciate all of what you shared and I’m just reflecting, Melinda, on your comment that we don’t want funders to engage in this way, in a way that’s not responsible that might cause harm if not done in the right way and so I appreciate you underscoring that and talking about ways both the funders directly should be engaged in listening but also some other mechanisms through partnering with some of their community-based organizations and grantee partners to do that. I’m curious if you could speak to what challenges, perhaps building on that, some challenges that funders are facing as they’re trying to put this into practice, and maybe some lessons you could share with respect to some of those challenges.
Melinda Tuan: I think one challenge, and this is what we faced in the very beginning is most funders think they’re listening just like most of us think we’re very good listeners. It’s not always the case, and it requires some self-reflection in terms of what kind of power do I hold as someone that works in a funding institution and how am I wielding that power. And then also institutional reflection on what power the institution has and how that institution is wielding that power in the community.
This harkens back to our earlier conversation, Jen, about our equity journeys. Without that kind of equity education, reflection, hard work in reflecting on where your sources of power are, where your sources of wealth are, and there’s so many adjacent efforts to what we’re doing around decolonizing wealth and reparations. Those are other ways that funders can shift power to community.
But we’re focusing on how to listen to shift power so our work is synergistic with these other efforts but they all have their roots in being equity centered, and what we’re doing and a lot of funders have not yet embarked on that journey, are not ready, and so the worst thing that could happen is a funder saying, oh, I’m going to listen to community and going in with their own western mindset and approaches and saying that they’re listening to community, collecting information. So many communities have been over surveyed and never heard back from the funder about what was collected and what was done with that data. That would be extractive and harmful. I think that’s the challenge that a lot of funders are facing, that self-reflection like are you ready to engage with community in these meaningful ways, nonextractive ways, ways that can really build and not harm.
I think one example I’ve had is like talking to a family foundation recently and we were doing a presentation at one of these philanthropy conferences and talking about the importance of bringing people from the community with lived experience on to the board, and the family foundation pulled me aside and said we can’t even get our board members, our family members, to agree to have a grantee present at a board meeting so we are very far away from bringing someone from the community with lived expertise on to the actual governing board of the family foundation. So there’s challenges across that spectrum in terms of where foundations are, how ready they are. With family foundations you see the next generation coming in. They’re more ready. They’ve done their equity journeys. They’ve done their reflection but they need to partner with the older generation who may chafe at the ideas that they’re bringing in. I mean those are some other challenges that we’re seeing people face.
In many ways we love the work of Trust-Based Philanthropy and some people confuse our work at Fund for Shared Insight with Trust-Based Philanthropy. We’re different initiatives, again very synergistic. We are trying to improve philanthropy in the different ways and strategies and principles that we have but, in some ways, when we look at the funders who have really embraced Trust-Based Philanthropy practices and the values, those are the funders that are ready to embrace listening to shift power because listening to community is one of the core principles of Trust-Based Philanthropy. But I think a lot of funders get stuck in the earlier parts of the list of six principles. Again, our work is very synergistic in that we could see that a funder that has embraced the idea that you can trust the community, you can trust the nonprofits, then it’s not so far to say and so we need to listen to community and shift power to community.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: One thing I think folks sometimes aren’t as clear on with what you’re saying is you were talking about—you’re not talking about listening to your grantees.
Melinda Tuan: Right.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: You’re talking about listening to residents and friends and family and neighbors who are in the communities where someone is working and living, and so I just want to underscore and remind folks because I think that is one of the most unique pieces of the work that you all are doing, which as you said is very complementary to the work that groups that Trust-Based Philanthropy are doing.
Melinda Tuan: And in some ways again when we were first starting this work, folks were confusing our work with the work of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and their grantee perception report which is all about funders listening in systematic ongoing ways to the nonprofits that they fund which is super important and we’re all for that. We also see that funders who are more willing to listen to their grantees in these systematic ongoing ways are probably more prepared to do the work of listening to community in systematic ongoing ways so again a lot of synergies with that work but we often do need to explain our work occurs around listening to the communities that are benefiting from the programs and services of nonprofits. We want to encourage funders to hear from those communities. You can listen to those nonprofits as well.
That’s also very important but sometimes nonprofit leaders and organizations are not complete proxies for the experience of the communities in which they are serving, and we don’t mean to bypass or jump over the nonprofits. A lot of the listening we’re suggesting is done in partnership with the nonprofits but it is really listening to the people in communities that are most harmed by systemic racism and intersectional inequities and making sure that those people in communities are better off in ways they define for themselves.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: I’m curious if there are any foundations in particular that you could share a story about how listening to community transformed their work or caused them to do something differently. You can name names or not pick a favorite child but a specific example would be really helpful.
Melinda Tuan: There are a number of different foundations that we feature in our Funder Listening Action Menu, and those who are listening to the podcast, if you were a funder who has been changed by listening practices, we want to hear from you and we want to feature you in our Funder Listening Action Menu because we know that funders are most influenced by their peers so the more peer examples we have, the better. I shared just earlier the example of the Tzedek Social Justice Fund have clearly been transformed by the way they do their work.
Another example would be Brooklyn Org. It used to be the Brooklyn Community Foundation, and they were doing good work in the community but over time realized that they needed to be doing listening on an ongoing basis to all the different communities within Brooklyn because Brooklyn is not a monolithic entity. An experience that my daughter has living in Brooklyn is quite different than those who have grown up and lived there for generations and so Brooklyn Org rebranded themselves first of all from being Brooklyn Community Foundation to Brooklyn Org but they conduct listening tours on an ongoing basis speaking again to how to listen without being extractive and doing harm to the community so they’re doing about 10 of these listening tours a year in the different subcommunities within Brooklyn and over time they have transformed their organization so that all of their grantmaking is done through participatory models in partnership with those communities that they’re listening to.
So that would be an example of an organization that’s really transformed over time. I would say its roots were always in the community. I think community foundations exist to support and serve the communities in which they are located but the ways in which you can do that can be quite transformational like with Brooklyn Org.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: So Melinda, this is so helpful and you’ve pointed folks to some concrete tools. I’m curious for folks who are listening that are not funders but rather community-based organizations, local nonprofits, if they want to convince their funders to operate in a way that has them listening to community more, what advice would you have for those nonprofit organizations?
Melinda Tuan: On our website at Fund for Shared Insight we have a blog called Insights for Change and we have videos, we have case studies, we have blogs by ourselves as well as by other partners in the field, and those would be some resources to point to. If you have a particular funder in mind that fits a profile of one that we have on our website, you can point them to those resources. We would be happy to connect people with other funders who have done this work and can then speak funder to funder about the importance of listening to shift power.
As I mentioned, we have these videos. We have video clips of different funders talking about why it’s important to listen. Sometimes again that peer to peer might be helpful, sharing a video of a funder talking about their own experience and how it’s been transformational to listen to community. Also through our Listen4Good partner, we have tons of evaluations that demonstrate why it is more effective for nonprofits to listen to their communities, for funders to support and build the capacity of nonprofits to listen to community because the programs will improve.
We also have research that we’ve commissioned across a number of years demonstrating that there is a relationship between listening to community and better outcomes. So all of those depending on where the funder is coming from, are they more like an evaluation person, are they more compelled by stories, by videos, we have a lot of resources to help nonprofits make that case.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Fantastic. Before we wrap up, Melinda, is there anything else that you’d like to add that we haven’t specifically touched on?
Melinda Tuan: Yeah, there are a couple of things. One is that we are in midst of launching a new campaign. We are—I’m not going to give it the name that we keep calling it internally because we haven’t branded it yet but it’s a whole campaign with some partners who represent these networks of funders. We recognize if we want to reach more funders working with some of the philanthropy serving organizations that have funders in their networks, it’s going to be more effective for us to do that and it will be more long lasting. So we are working with them to create this campaign that has a narrative change piece, a change in the narrative in philanthropy from, for example, moving from ownership of the foundation to stewardship. There is another component about peer influencing because we know that funders respond to what their peers are doing and saying so there’s an influencer strategy. Then there’s a capacity building strategy. So I’ve mentioned the Funder Listening Action Menu. We have a Participatory Philanthropy Toolkit. There’s Listen4Good. We have a number of tools and resources that we have developed, that we’re partnering with others to develop to help funders do this work of listening to shift power.
And then if we have time, there’s another story I’d love to tell. I mentioned that we convene our core funders in person three times a year. We always have a learning component, and two weeks ago we met at the Packard Foundation and just happened to learn that the author of The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, was speaking in the area so we invited her to come to our dinner. We had about 25 funders at this dinner and I had the privilege of interviewing her. Karla is, we believe, the first person to graduate from Harvard as an undocumented person.
The lesson we learned from that conversation with her was not only about the experience of undocumented Americans and just what an amazing person she is but a reminder that you need to be prepared to be surprised by what you hear from community because we come in with our own lenses from our own lived expertise and experience, and funders are often operating in these different silos of funding so we come in with like, all right, I’m going to fund this area but it doesn’t relate to that area, and when I asked Karla what advice would you give philanthropy about how to improve the lives of undocumented Americans, her response was fund reproductive justice.
That was a surprising response to everyone that I talked to in the room afterwards because she said the most vulnerable undocumented Americans are often women and they cannot travel across states. For them to have that ability to own their own bodies and the decisions for their own lives in safety means creating a more just reproductive health system for everyone but undocumented Americans in particular will benefit from that. And it breaks across all these barriers because you think, all right, from a siloed foundation perspective you’re asking how should we improve the lives of undocumented Americans and you get this answer that cuts across strategies, cuts across silos so just be prepared to be surprised, and then to act on what you hear.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Absolutely. I think that is a really powerful place to end, Melinda, because being prepared to be surprised and acting as you said based on what you learn is what this is all about so thank you so much. How can folks continue to follow the work of the Fund for Shared Insight?
Melinda Tuan: We have a website as I mentioned, fundforsharedinsight.org. You can subscribe to our newsletter. There’s a link at the bottom of each page. You can do that and you can also follow us on LinkedIn.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today for a very timely conversation, and hope that everyone else appreciated the listen as much as I did having the opportunity to chat with you so thank you, Melinda.
Melinda Tuan: Thank you so much for having me and thanks for hosting this podcast.
Jennifer Splansky Juster: You are so welcome.
And this closes out this episode of the Collective Impact Forum podcast. If you are interested in learning more about what was discussed, you can find links to resources in the footnotes for this episode. And if you’re enjoying all that we share at the Collective Impact Forum podcast, we encourage you to rate us on your preferred podcast platform, and share your favorite episodes with colleagues.
We would like to acknowledge that this episode was produced and edited on the unceded, traditional lands of the Coast Salish people, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot tribes. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the past, present, and futures of these tribes.
The Intro music for this episode was composed by Rafael Krux and our outro music is composed by Kevin Macleod.
In Forum news, we’re excited to share that registration is open for the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit, that will be held online this April 29-May 1, 2025. It’s our biggest learning event of the year, featuring over 30 virtual sessions, and sharing out best practices from collaboratives from across the U.S. and globally. Please visit our events section at collectiveimpactforum.org if you would like to join the 2025 Collective Impact Action Summit. We hope you can join us.
This is Tracy Timmons-Gray, Associate Director here at the Collective Impact Forum, and your podcast producer. I want to say thank you so much for listening, and we look forward to connecting with you more in our next episode. Until next time, let’s keep working towards collective impact.
