Funder Listening Action Menu

Before transitioning to a participatory model, Borealis Philanthropy’s Communities Transforming Policing Fund (CTPF) had a traditional grantmaking process in which grantees were selected solely by fund staff, mostly through an invite-only process. Now, deliberations and decisions are made by a participatory grantmaking committee, composed of community members identified by Borealis’s grantee partners. And an open application process has meant more small and emerging nonprofits have had the opportunity to receive support.

“Ultimately, our transition to a participatory grantmaking model not only created space for a diversity of voices with direct personal and professional experience to make decisions on the distribution of resources,” writes program director Jeree Thomas. “It also birthed new practices and ways of being in relationship that our team at Borealis did not have before.”

When ACT for Alexandria set out to establish a fund with a participatory-grantmaking approach, its first focus group with community leaders provided feedback that signaled the foundation did not yet have the track record or trust necessary for such an effort. In response, ACT slowed the fund’s timeline, prioritizing relationship building in its day-to-day work, creating more space for community voice, partnering more deeply with community-based organizations, and executing a community-centered strategic planning process for the whole foundation.

That process led ACT back to its plans for a participatory-grantmaking fund when members of the strategy planning team, composed primarily of Alexandrians with lived experience at the intersection of race, immigration, and poverty, agreed to work on the fund’s inaugural community advisory board.

The Indigenous Women’s Flow Fund (IWFF) convenes five Indigenous women — described as artists, seed savers, poets, organizers, mothers, daughters, and grandmothers — to shape the themes of grantmaking programs, identify groups to support, and make final decisions on grants. An IWFF report says, “By making space for Indigenous women to create their own practices, rituals, and relationships to giving, IWFF becomes an example of what is possible when communities are given the autonomy to design processes that work best from within their own cultures and wisdom.”

Brooklyn Org has transitioned all its strategic grantmaking (more than $4 million a year) to be conducted in partnership with community members. It employs a participatory model, including through its youth fellowship program where young people run their own grant program, reviewing proposals, conducting site visits, and making recommendations. Through its Brooklyn Elders Fund, the foundation distributes money by incorporating the advice of a rotating group of older residents who work alongside program staff to inform grantmaking and advocacy efforts. And foundation staff work with an advisory council of residents personally impacted by substance misuse or who have worked with impacted communities to determine how money from a Wellness and Recovery Fund should be distributed.

During ongoing listening tours in Brooklyn neighborhoods, the foundation actively recruits participants for its advisory councils (members are compensated) so that, as the president Jocelynne Rainey writes: “[W]e have a continuous and powerful pipeline of community informants who can become community decision makers at their community foundation.”

During a partnership between the City of Philadelphia and the Scattergood Foundation, the Overdose Prevention and Community Healing Fund used national opioid settlement money to address the harms of the opioid epidemic. As one of the foundation’s three “Participatory Funds” at the time, the Prevention Fund involved impacted residents in decision making, such as through a Community Advisory Committee that helped set grantmaking strategy. A committee member’s experience of having lost a loved one to overdose had led the group to reframe the fund’s grant focus areas to elevate needs around community and family healing.

In addition to the advisory committee, Community Granting Groups (CGG) in each of the fund’s neighborhoods of focus had reviewed applications and made selections for awards through a facilitated participatory process. CGG members, most of whom had been in recovery and/or had cared for a loved one in addiction, were careful not to evaluate grant applications based on grammar, spelling, or writing style, but rather on the organization’s impact. Members also shared their personal experiences with organizations, as well as the reputation that organizations had in the community. Caitlin O’Brien, Scattergood’s director of learning and community impact, says this process helped identify organizations that were deeply rooted in their communities, and lifted up grassroots groups that do not have access to professional grant writers and other resources, which often causes them to be overlooked by traditional philanthropy.