Earlier this year, the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions team held its annual retreat in Montgomery, Alabama, visiting the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites. As part of this transformative experience, the Forum’s team was honored to spend time with Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Mr. Stevenson encouraged the team (including three of the authors listed here) to lean into the power of truth-telling, and reminded us that one of the most important actions we as nonprofit leaders can take to effect change is to get proximate to people who are on the front lines of experiencing oppression and injustice and listen deeply to these communities.

Each of us, from different vantage points, has had the privilege of seeing the value of proximity in action through the work of the Opportunity Youth Forum, an intermediary within the Forum that supports a network of more than forty place-based collaboratives focused on young adults ages 16-24 who are engaged in neither education nor employment.

Like the work of Opportunity Youth Forum, it is this idea of getting proximate that is at the heart of a new Center for Effective Philanthropy report, “Voices that Matter: How Nonprofits and Foundations Engage with the Communities they Support.” But the work of getting proximate is intricate. It requires intention and purposeful action — it means listening well, building trust, and acting meaningfully on feedback.

Lessons From a Decade of Community-Driven Impact

From over a decade of supporting place-based efforts, the Forum has learned two key lessons about what it means to “listen well”: first, we must approach work with community partners with deep humility and a commitment to building trust, centering local expertise, and cultivating proximate leadership. Second, we are accountable to our local partners for meaningfully incorporating their feedback into our work. Genuine community-driven success and sustainable intergenerational impact is contingent on both.

‘Listening Well’

In the early days of the Opportunity Youth Forum, the network’s rural community partners shared that there was not sufficient representation of rural communities in the network to form a meaningful peer learning community. They also shared that many of the solutions being uplifted in our learning agenda were not tailored for their unique contexts. Tribal community partners echoed similar sentiments.

Read the full article about listening deeply to communities by Bakhtawer Abbasi, Jamiel Alexander, Yelena Nemoy, and Elisha Smith-Arrillaga at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.