Listening My Way to a Different Business

This month marks one year since I started Common Cause Grants & Consulting.

The business I'm running isn't the one I set out to build. It's better, and it's better because I listened.

The plan met the people

I started out assuming I'd be writing grants for small nonprofits. That was the plan: take the writing off someone's plate, hand back a finished application.

Then I started having conversations with nonprofit leaders, and I paid attention to what they were asking for. What people needed wasn't someone to write for them. It was someone to help them understand the grant landscape. Why an application was getting passed over, how to build the internal infrastructure needed to be competitive in the grant space. They needed technical assistance and strategic support, not a ghostwriter. So that's what I began to build.

That listening paid off in a second way, too. I noticed the part of this work I’m best at: taking a complex, tangled idea or project, turning it into steps someone can actually act on, and then teaching them to do it themselves. Once I saw that clearly, I let the business grow toward it instead of holding onto the original plan.

So I created the Fundable Nonprofit Starter Kit, an 11-lesson do-it-yourself toolkit for new nonprofits who want an easy-to-understand way to build a foundation for grant funding. This month, I’m launching the first cohort of the Grant Readiness Intensive, with a second cohort starting in the fall.

None of that would have happened if I'd stuck to my first idea. It happened because I treated every conversation and every piece of feedback as information and guidance.

The power of listening

If you lead a small nonprofit, you already know the power of listening and adapting. You listen to your community. You let your community determine what gets developed, and you listen and respond. The good leaders are the ones willing to let the community lead and reshape the work. They can tell you when a program isn't landing, when a need has shifted, when the people you serve are telling you something different than what your original plan assumed.

Listening well means sitting with the possibility that your idea wasn't the answer. But it's also what makes an organization genuinely responsive instead of just well-intentioned.

There were plenty of moments this year that felt uncertain. Messages went unanswered, and some weeks I couldn't tell if any of it was working. That's normal for a first year, and I'd guess it's familiar to a lot of you from your own early days leading an organization.

But every time I stepped back and listened to what people were telling me, the work became clearer.

Trust the feedback, even when it asks you to let go of the plan you started with. That's not a detour from building something good; for a lot of us, it's the actual process.

Thank you for a year of reading, and for the conversations, replies, and feedback that shaped more of this than you probably realize.

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