Success Measures served as learning partner to the de Beaumont Foundation’s BUILD Health Challenge, an initiative supporting innovative multi-sector partnerships working to address important health issues in their communities. Collaborating with BUILD staff, the team co-designed and implemented a national “listening tour” to gather and document input from BUILD’s partners and past awardees—including community-based organizations, healthcare and public health departments, and philanthropy—to inform how future BUILD efforts can better incorporate community voices with lived experience and strategies addressing health and racial equity. Insights and themes developed by the Success Measures team from the listening tour were incorporated into BUILD’s final report.
To delve further into these insights, BUILD collaborated with Success Measures to organize a series of conversations on racial equity intended to actively involve BUILD alumni awardees in defining their own understanding of racial equity and racial justice, specifically within the framework of BUILD.
Following the listening tour, Success Measures continued working with BUILD by facilitating a series of conversations with former grantees to define racial equity for community-based and health-focused practitioners. The conversations yielded insights to inform BUILD’s work and share with their partners and broader philanthropic field to exercise meaningful engagement and intentional learning. (2020 – 2023)
In 2025, the Melissa Monbouquette with the de Beaumont Foundation and Jessica Anders-Mulcahy at Success Measures wrote about Success Measures’ past work with BUILD in The Power of Listening to Communities, published in the Foundation Review, Volume 17 (2025) Issue 2. The article highlights the listening process, led by Success Measures, that BUILD invested in over several years and what it enabled. It also highlights what made the listening possible, how BUILD and its community partners took action based on the feedback and how the long-term practice built trust and enabled transformative change.