In a conventional grant process, donors, foundation staff or boards decide where money goes. Participatory grantmaking moves some of those decisions to the people who will live with the results. In the version described by Cynthia Gibson’s 2018 guide for GrantCraft, Deciding Together: Shifting Power and Resources Through Participatory Grantmaking, funders cede decision-making power about funding to the communities they aim to serve.
What it looks like
Participation runs along a spectrum. At one end, community members advise a funder that still decides. Further along, they sit on the panels that review applications, set the criteria or choose the strategy. At the far end, a community-led group controls the money outright. Gibson’s guide, which Alliance magazine described as the first focused entirely on participatory grantmaking, drew on examples from many participatory funders, many of them smaller foundations focused on human rights. The Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations supported the work.
The case for it
Community members can bring knowledge about needs, risks and trusted organizations that a funder may lack. A process that lets them decide also changes who holds power, which some practitioners see as part of the result rather than a means to it. Humanity’s Checklist names gatekeepers as one of the six sources upstream of world problems: concentrated decision rights may exclude useful ideas. Participatory grantmaking applies the same idea to philanthropy.
The questions it raises
Who speaks for a community, and how are they chosen? What does it cost in time and money to run a fair process, and who pays participants for their time? How does a funder handle conflicts of interest when panelists know the applicants? Practitioners answer these in different ways, and the answers shape the results.
What we don’t know
The guide presents principles and practitioners’ experience. It does not establish a general causal estimate of the effect on final outcomes. Do community-decided grants achieve more than expert-decided ones on the same outcome, and in which settings? That is Open Problem 14, the Agency Premium. See also the Missing Voice and beneficiary feedback.