Participatory Grantmaking: letting communities decide

What is participatory grantmaking?

Participatory grantmaking is an approach where the people affected by a funding decision take part in making it. Instead of a funder's staff or board deciding alone, community members, and sometimes potential grantees themselves, help set criteria and choose who gets funded.

The premise is that those closest to a problem have the clearest view of what will work. Sharing decision power is meant to produce better-targeted funding and to correct the imbalance of a distant funder deciding on a community's behalf.

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How is it different from a selection committee?

A conventional selection committee is usually made up of the funder's own people or its chosen experts. Participatory grantmaking changes who sits at that table: it deliberately includes the affected community in the decision, not just as advisors but as decision-makers.

So the mechanism (a group evaluating and choosing) can look similar, but the composition and the power dynamic are different. The point of participatory grantmaking is precisely that the decision no longer rests with the funder alone.

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How is it different from trust-based philanthropy?

They are complementary but address different stages. Participatory grantmaking concerns who makes the funding decision. Trust-based philanthropy concerns how the funder treats grantees once the decision is made, with lighter reporting and unrestricted support.

A funder could share decision power (participatory) without lightening its reporting, or lighten reporting (trust-based) while still deciding alone. In practice the two often go together, as parts of a wider effort to shift power in philanthropy.

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Managing participatory processes in a platform

Involving external decision-makers raises practical questions of access, scoring and transparency. A grant management platform can give community reviewers controlled access to applications and capture their input in the same auditable flow as any other grantmaking decision.