Last year, an organization we both respect sent a provocative video message to funders. “You need to stop doing community engagement.”

Because both our organizations, Fund for Shared Insight and Brooklyn Org (formerly Brooklyn Community Foundation), have strong commitments to listening — one form of community engagement — we were surprised. And resistant. We think funders should listen more, not less.

But we understood the point. The problem the video was highlighting is not that funders are listening too much, it’s that they’re not listening well. Because listening, like almost anything else, can be done poorly. And, as the Full Frame Initiative points out in their video, listening poorly can cause more harm than not listening at all.

Communicating this distinction, between extractive or performative listening and meaningful listening that leads to real change, has been a communications challenge since the Fund for Shared Insight began its work more than a decade ago. Adding to the difficulty is that listening is a common term, used in everyday conversation. Most funders and nonprofits believe they know what listening means, and think they already do a lot of it. The real issue lies in how they are listening, who they are listening to, and what they do with what they hear.

When our organizations talk about the importance of listening, we’re referring to a practice and a way of being that goes beyond asking thoughtful questions at site visits, convening community members to provide input on a new strategic direction, or surveying grantees to find out whether the online application system is easy to use. We’re talking about inclusive, systematic listening that engages nonprofits and community members as partners and co-creators and builds trust and accountability by reporting back to the community on what was heard and plans to respond.

In the past, we’ve sometimes used “high-quality listening” to describe this distinction. But high-quality, like strategic or innovative, can mean different things to different folks. So lately we’ve been using the phrase “listening, responding, and shifting power” to signify that listening is just the first step — without action it can be an empty gesture — and that one of the aims of listening should be to address the inequities and power imbalances that characterize philanthropy and the broader society. We’ve been encouraging other funders to listen well, and trying to model that in our own practices.

Read the full article about listening well by Rick Moyers and Sabrina Hargrave at The Center for Effective Philanthropy.