It’s all about listening. As I had the honour of talking with Theo Sowa, co-chair of the Equality Fund, during our keynote session at the Innovations in International Philanthropy Symposium, that word, listening, resonated again and again.

Too often, she noted, we ask those whom we seek to support only questions about the problems they face, not about the solutions they might embrace. We ask them, as Theo put it, about their victimhood. But too often we miss the seeds of solutions that are in their statements and answers.

The good news, such as it is, in all this might be that we are more aware of that shortcoming than ever. We embrace the concept of proximate philanthropy, of the value of lived experience. We talk about bringing others to the table, and of shared decision-making. And we know, especially in international philanthropy, that those elements can be hard to embrace, when those people closest to the challenges are distant from us: geographically, technologically, or experientially.

In my first weeks and months at the Boston Foundation, I have had the opportunity to do a lot of listening to better understand our work as a grantmaker, a partner with donors and a civic leader. I’ve also gotten to listen and learn of the important opportunity we have as a community foundation with a local focus and a global reach. Through The Philanthropic Initiative (TPI) and TPI’s Center for Global Philanthropy, a co-host of the Symposium, we are uniquely poised to support more thoughtful international philanthropy that begins with listening and learning from people with lived experience.

What seems incongruous at first – a community foundation hosting a global initiative – appears less so when we look at our current crises and the best practices to address them. As we continue to experience a triple pandemic of a global pandemic, racial injustice and economic inequities felt in Boston and abroad, it is clearer than ever that there are few issues that can be defined as only local.

Read more about the importance of listening in local philanthropy by M. Lee Pelton at The Philanthropic Initiative.