More than Money: Participatory Grantmaking and Perceptions of Power | Fund for Shared Insight

Practices that seek to disrupt typical power relationships have grown in visibility and uptake over the last few years, including participatory grantmaking, which changes “the role of foundations from arbiters of what gets done to facilitators of a process in which they work with other organizations and non-grantmakers to designate priorities and act.”1 In 2019, Fund for Shared Insight launched a participatory grantmaking effort called the Participatory Climate Initiative. The funders were curious about extending the ethos of listening and feedback to organizations engaged in advocacy, building on prior work with direct-service nonprofits and a landscape scan from the Aspen Planning and Evaluation Program, “Meaningfully Connecting with Communities in Advocacy and Policy Work.”  One of the explicit goals of the initiative included: “Experiment with participatory grantmaking to help elevate beneficiary voice and share power.”