New York, NY, Oct. 02, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- New research released today by GrantCraft, a free service of Foundation Center, explores how funders can cede decision-making power about funding decisions to the communities they aim to serve. With financial support from the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking illustrates why and how funders globally are engaging in this growing practice.
"This approach isn’t just about more effective grantmaking, but that it also creates a paradigm shift in how we work alongside communities as agents of change in their own context. By sharing decision-making power about money, the participatory approach itself is part of the impact,” says Katy Love, director of resources at the Wikimedia Foundation, an organization that takes a participatory grantmaking approach.
Participatory grantmaking is increasingly visible and of interest to a range of funders, because it revolutionizes traditional structures of philanthropy. Specifically:
- It redefines who qualifies as a “grantmaker,” and challenges traditional power dynamics, which affect everything from who knows about grant opportunities to who gets those grants.
- It goes beyond grantmaking to the importance of advancing public and democratic participation in decision making.
- It strengthens trust and credibility between donors and grantees.
Written by Cynthia Gibson, the guide features voices and examples drawn from a range of participatory grantmakers. Participatory grantmaking models range in geographic scale—from local neighborhoods to global movements—and work across numerous focus areas including disability rights, climate change, and youth opportunity. “This GrantCraft guide highlights practices of many smaller, human rights-focused foundations. We often look to large, well-known foundations for learning, but the grassroots foundations featured in this guide have just as much wisdom to offer, and are particularly intentional about inclusion,” says Jen Bokoff, guide editor and director of stakeholder engagement at Foundation Center.
For funders like the Red Umbrella Fund, an Amsterdam-based sex worker led fund, this practice is an acknowledgement that activist voices matter as much as, if not more, than donor voices. Both international funders like the Robert Carr Fund and local funders like Los Angeles’ Liberty Hill Foundation operate under vastly different models but share an ethos that the communities they aim to serve should directly control decision making.
To capture the breadth of this work, the GrantCraft guide is complemented by additional resources, including a collection of relevant publications and a repository that includes details about specific foundations’ approaches to participatory grantmaking.
While the guide is the first of its kind focused exclusively on participatory grantmaking, it builds on Foundation Center’s work tied to community philanthropy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and our global research.
Download the guide here: grantcraft.org/participatorygrantmaking. Share and follow the conversation with the hashtag #ShiftThePower.
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