Getting Proximate: Effecting Change by Centering Community Voice

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.

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.

In response, the Forum intentionally worked to expand the number of rural and tribal communities within the network. At the same time, the Forum launched two communities of practice to support peer learning around effective local approaches to supporting youth reconnection: Rural Cohort Community of Practice (in collaboration with its implementation partner, Jobs for the Future) and the Native, Indigenous, and Tribal Community of Practice (in collaboration with Native Americans in Philanthropy).

Acting on meaningful feedback allowed Opportunity Youth Forum to strengthen its learning agenda, while continuing to build sustainable, long-lasting trust with its community partners.

By approaching its role as an intermediary with humility, an understanding that we do not have the answers, and a deep reverence for local expertise, the Forum was able to design learning and technical assistance agendas that are targeted to the needs of a range of communities we work with.

All too often, funders and intermediaries approach work in communities with the best of intentions while carrying an unconscious (or overt) bias towards their own expertise and solutions. Too often that leads to an “extractive” experience for the community members. Listening — and acting on what we hear — is an effective countermeasure to this harmful tendency.

Leading WIth Our Values: ‘Nothing About Us, Without Us’

The Opportunity Youth Forum was launched with the principle, “nothing about us, without us” as a foundational value. The Forum believes that young people have the right — and, critically, the necessary expertise — to represent their own interests, play decision-making roles in local collaboratives, and design local solutions in partnership with adults.

During the last decade, the Forum has put this into practice by engaging young people as co-designers and co-creators in the learning agendas for its convenings and forthcoming strategic plan for the next ten years of grantmaking initiatives.

The Forum also engages young people as paid consultants to serve on our informal Leadership Council of funders and thought partners and to provide strategic feedback into our existing and emerging initiatives such as our expanding Belonging, Meaning, Wellbeing, and Purpose field-building work — much of which emerged from what young people are asking for as they seek to become greater protagonists in their own narratives.

Through these efforts, the Forum not only “gets proximate” to the youth community we serve but, more importantly, seeks to contribute to the development of the next generation of proximate leaders by providing young people with opportunities to build advocacy, community organizing, program design, participation in democracy, and other skills. 

Meeting the Moment with Transformative Grantmaking

‘Listening well’ to partners also calls on transformative leadership moments that symbolize unwavering and steadfast commitment towards partners in times of uncertainty. These  moments  require bold action necessary to meet the moment and address the challenges at hand.

Drawing a parallel to the COVID-19 pandemic, our country and nonprofit partners face a new pandemic of disinvestment and misinformation in 2025. The reduction in government support, combined with radical othering of many of the youth and communities in our network means that we must do more.

As one example, the Opportunity Youth Forum is seeking to aggregate more funding in order to provide general operating support to our community partners (similar to how many funders responded to the pandemic). We are also listening to community networks in a subset of states as they seek to organize around greater support for the rising generations in those places. This work is emergent from what young people and communities have asked for in places as diverse as California and Texas.   

As Aspen Forum for Community Solutions Executive Director Steve Patrick said:

Building on What We Know Works

The “Voices that Matter” report notes that nonprofit leaders reported “their funders would be better able to support their organization if they developed a deeper understanding of the communities they seek to benefit.” This disconnect tells us that when we as funders or intermediaries think we are authentically engaging our partners in providing feedback, chances are we could do more to “listen well.” How do we respond when stakeholders do not feel that they have been heard, when we receive feedback that is difficult to hear, or when we do not have resources or staff capacity to act on feedback immediately?

At Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, we believe that to do our work of community power-building and racial equity well, we must lead with our values, build trust with our partners to work towards mutuality and relationships that are transformative rather than transactional, and work continuously to cultivate ongoing proximate leadership. 

We believe that relationships aren’t a part of a strategy but in fact the foundation on which everything else is built. We lead by honoring local community insights as generational wisdom, and earnestly uphold the stories and truths of all the lives that are nourished and impacted by our work. Asking for, and deeply listening to, feedback and demonstrating accountability by incorporating it into our work is a fundamental strategy in our toolbox as an intermediary. Listening well and leading with our values effectively informs our work and drives the success of the communities and populations we serve.

Bakhtawer Abbasi is the communications program manager at Aspen Forum for Community Solutions. Jamiel Alexander is the senior organizer at Aspen Forum for Community Solutions. Yelena Nemoy is the deputy director of the Opportunity Youth Forum at Aspen Forum for Community Solutions. Elisha Smith Arrillaga, Ph.D. is vice president of Research at CEP.