Practicing Constituent Voice for Social Change

A big thanks to David Bonbright, Executive Director of Keystone Accountability and GrantCraft community member, for trying out the new Share Your Wisdom feature on GrantCraft! Share Your Wisdom is a feature designed to allow GrantCraft members to share their knowledge and experience with the rest of the community. If you have something you'd like to share, you can find the link on your Dashboard.

In this video, Kirsten Lodal, Executive Director of LIFT, introduces the attendees of the 2014 Gathering of Leaders to practicing consitituent voice, a tool LIFT has implemented to foster systemic listening as a method of evaluation.

If practicing constituent voice sounds like a foreign concept, don't worry. It's actually grounded in a pretty simple idea: that in order to have the most impact on the people you serve, you must learn to listen to them. Organizations operate in a world of competing voices, where "often the voice that gets crowded out is the voice that means the most to us." But, as Kirsten notes, "If we're not paying attention to this, we're not doing our jobs."

Watch the entire talk below. You can find out more about Kirsten and LIFT at http://www.liftcommunities.org/.
 

About the author(s)

Research Assistant
Foundation Center